


Cried Giles Corey: More Weight

by lonerofthepack



Series: To Fall Next Upon Salem, and So Go On [1]
Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them - Fandom
Genre: (whatever that means), Bashing of Bible-justified abuse, Bible-justified abuse., Canon-Typical Violence, Cutting, F/M, Hanukkah described by a goy, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Animal Abuse, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, POV Third Person Limited, Panic Attacks, Period Typical Attitudes, Questionable use of sex toys, Somehow this ended up a holidays story, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Wild accusations of Fae-like behavior in American Wizardry, Written prior to COG. Not FBCOG compliant., incorrect use of elastic bandages, moderately reliable narrator, odd experiments in formatting, period-atypical attitudes, whump!Graves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2018-12-22
Packaged: 2019-09-23 16:17:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 34,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17083607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonerofthepack/pseuds/lonerofthepack
Summary: "Mr. Graves, are you—well?"No, he wasn’t well. He hadn’t been well in months—possibly in years, if he sat down and spent some time brooding about it. He wouldn’t, a year ago, have said he was particularly unhappy with his social circle being primarily his work. He hadn’t, a year ago, realized that he had become quite so much a part of the Woolworth Building’s woodwork, unremarkable and so intrinsic that no one thought to look twice.Grindelwald hadn’t been entirely wrong, to say he lived a sad life, divorced from any manner of intimacy, untouched and untouching.But he wondered a bit now, what it might be like, to add an element of non-control.





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> An alternate title might have been, ‘How the fuck did no one realize: a story of the wide web of bureaucratic interactions’.
> 
> Many, many thanks to kallistob for their beta-ing services--I am indebted.
> 
> A note about rating: the stated rating is for violence, specifically sexual violence. I’ve written Percival as being a bit wishy-washy as to whether he fully accepts that; as a part of that, there’s various discussions about it, including something akin to a flashback, which is handled primarily at the very beginning of the fic. Part one is likely the most distressing, and contains no "real-time" violence. There is only explicit sexual contact in the epilogue, entirely consensual. Your mileage may vary.
> 
> Further notes: This started out as a character study, and has become an essay about why the implications of Rappaport makes me crazy--alternatively, this started as a 7k hurt/comfort fic, and has since developed into something more akin to performance art with a dash of police-procedural slam poetry and a ridiculous amount of attention paid to Percival’s parents. (What even is MACUSA? I just had to construct the bare (ha!) bones of an entire legal structure. Do wizards vote? How are any of these people permitted to run the country? Who appointed Percival? Do Presidents have proper term limits? Did Miranda cross over? Did anyone actually think through the mechanics of Rappaport’s Law, or did they all just collectively lose their minds?) I consulted a real-live lawyer to try and deal with this--many thanks to the inestimable earlgreytea68. 
> 
> I now know more about ‘20s era men’s jewelry than I ever intended. And shirt collars. So much was happening with shirt collars in the late ‘20s. I need you to understand just how important shirt collars are as a status symbol. 
> 
> Rubber bands were a thing, as were ace bandages, I checked. Telflon was not, to my disappointment.
> 
> And finally: Forgive me, fandom, for I have sinned: I ascribed maliciousness to a character without considering JKR’s oppositional relationship with consistent character cues. All timelines except my own have been dismissed, summarily, and Albus Dumbledore’s motivations make me itch. I haven’t seen Crimes of Grindelwald yet, because I’ve been finishing this. And, you know, finals.
> 
> PS: I edit compulsively while writing. So while writing the sequel(s), this fic will change subtly.
> 
> PSS: Yes. It means exactly what you’re thinking it means. Remember this note in 1500 words; it really does mean exactly what you think. Perhaps don’t start this fic in public.

"Mr. Graves, are you—well?" Mr. Scamander murmured, coming to stand beside him. He was just a bit too close for Percival’s comfort at a full-arm’s reach away—

 

 

( _Weird_ , he thought, distantly, perturbed by his own desire to shift away. To flinch.

 

Newt Scamander was one of the few people he normally kept well inside his guard, mostly because—

—well, mostly because that was the best way to grab him before he Apparated, and the man could Apparate like lightning. Percival had missed him once, and spent nearly three weeks trying to track him down to stuff a permit into his hands for the _fucking cockatrice_ that Percival had despaired of and Scamander had gladly taken.

He’d named the thing Lucy, Percival recalled.

 

—because--Theseus Scamander was a friend and a frighteningly competent duelist; notoriously overprotective of his (perfectly capable if frequently chaos-bedeviled) younger brother. He was also a bit of a hothead with his friends. A playful duel wasn’t made especially easier by the fact that Theseus didn’t actually want you dead. Percival made a point of indulging Theseus, when it could be done, and the Ministry and MACUSA were on excellent terms because of it. Which reminded him, he was a week and a half late replying to Theseus’s last letter, and if he didn’t want one of those playful duels, he’d get on it, sharpish.)

 

 

—because...Scamander wore a combination of soap and cologne and dust and sweat and what Percival could only imagine were the clinging scents of his case’s habitats, that smelled…frankly fantastic. Like walking out into the crisp piney-mist of autumn time in the Pinelands behind the estate, in one of his father’s ancient great coats, freshly washed. There was no good reason, especially, to like it; it ought to have smelled like a peat bog, the sort he used to get in trouble for playing in, like the dark and dangerous sides of nature.)

 

“Mr. Graves?”

Scamander’s voice was dropped low to discourage eavesdropping—unnecessary in a boardroom rapidly emptying of other inhabitants, and off record now that the meeting was adjourned. The man was soft-spoken to begin with. Attempting to be subtler still made him look shifty and nervous, as if he were guilty of _something_. He was a clatter of body language that had those police-man’s instincts clamouring for Percival to investigate.

 

(Better to _not_ —shifty the man might seem, but Percival knew better than to spook so useful a pigeon as Scamander. Spooked assets rarely remained _assets_ long.

Particularly when Scamander could be corralled with something so easy as permits and a promise not to kill creatures with abandon.

Particularly when _managed_ , he solved more problems than he created.

Left to his own devices, Scamander was a political nightmare in the brewing—a British citizen, nominally a member of the Ministry, so closely connected to their Deputy Head, the owner of a case half-filled with beasts who had been exiled from their own habitats on pain of extinction. _Particularly_ when that suitcase of his only ever exploded into chaos when disturbed.

 

Particularly when….particularly when there was no justice to be served for interfering. Nothing would be helped for disturbing man nor beasts.

 

MACUSA had been one of the first magical governments to offer Scamander a traveling retainership, three months after Scamander’s first chaotic visit, seventy-six days after Percival’s rescue and thirty-one days after Percival had stalked out of the hospital and straight into his own office, daring anyone to stop him. Honestly, it was only so delayed because Newt didn’t wash in again until then. The papers had been waiting for him for twenty-nine days at that point, and had earned their own paperweight on Percival’s desk.

Mrs. Colon, bless her, freshly transferred back from a hastily-contrived personnel flip with the Richmond office by memos written in a still shaking hand, had not required direction to have stacked the pertinent reports on his desk, awaiting his determined arrival from the long-term curse-damage ward. The sensation of gratitude, that Grindelwald hadn’t fired her or harmed her in any way, had been enough to make him smile fondly over a stack of paper eighteen inches high.

The smile hadn’t lasted long. Six pages into the Grindelwald after-action report, he’d put it aside to start the process of writing out permits. Eight pages later, he’d put them aside in favor of a catch-all. Fourteen pages—and two cups of illicit coffee, a moment to dry-chew an antacid when his still-delicate stomach twisted in punishment for the coffee, and scowling at the potions-reminder bat that was smacking against his face—after that, he shoved away from his desk and limped to the President’s suite to fly the idea of just _keeping_ the damned man the next time he ripped through: on retainer, or in a cell for his own safety.

Seraphina Picquery had looked like she’d chewed a lemon when he appeared at her door, and ten minutes later had startled him so badly his teeth jarred on how he closed his jaw, by agreeing half-way through his report justifying the retainership.

Not one to look the President’s acquiescence—or the budget she permitted—in the mouth, Percival had stood, nodded a half-bow, and departed. He’d snarled too hard and too futilely when she’d put him on mandatory half-days until further notice to linger long enough for her to glance at the clock on the wall and realize he should have been gone two hours before.

 

(Thirty-six pages into the report, he felt like he’d been hit by a no-maj truck and her acquiescence suddenly made sense. An obscurial in New York City, under their noses, and Grindelwald had found him—had, had _groomed_ him. And Percival’s aurors had helped murder the boy.

Thirty-six pages into the report, he’d limped to the case board he kept, and tacked an over-large sheet of paper to it: The Barebone Amendment. When he felt like he could breathe again, still shaking, still woozy but no longer gagging with panic; he vanished the blood he’d dripped on his carpet and apparated home, afraid of the ugly fury in his heart for the organization he’d given his life to.)

 

 

—So now when Scamander was in the area, he popped in to provide applicable updates and respond to any creature issues Percival’s department had run across. It made for awesome amounts of localized chaos in sporadic doses; the sort that made Percival lower his head into his hands in displayed consternation when inevitably an auror burst into his office over the newest Scamander emergency, and five minutes later wholeheartedly enjoy the chill whip of Apparition off to the far reaches of the country to vigorously extricate a sheepish Scamander and his newest beastly acquisition from whatever trouble they found themselves in.

 

They’d started a trend: the British Ministry, or so he’d heard, had been an embarrassing third on that list to put Scamander properly under yoke, to harness that chaos into something quantifiable, making the invitation only about six months ago, and only after Scamander had single-handedly managed to resolve a centaur revolt without bloodshed or No-maj Obliviations. Percival had to admit surprise it had happened at all—nothing bothered an English bureaucrat like an official wide remit. One given to a loose-cannon scientist must make them all _itch_.

And, yes, of course he handled Scamander and Scamander’s case himself—if only for the exercise and the adrenaline, but mostly because the man made his senior Aurors twitch: snagged somewhere between mountainous guilt and detestation and horrified awe ('the man had a _Nundu'_  was a frequent complaint, and to be fair: he did), combined with the same instinctive reaction to Scamander’s guilty-of- _something_ air, not quite so well schooled.

 

Sometimes he took a wet-behind-the-ears rookie as well, just to assess how well they were learning to handle chaos and explosions; Scamander had never yet failed to provide.)

 

(A _Nundu_ , sir.)

 

He blinked, focus wavering as Scamander’s words finally started to penetrate the fog of conflicting thoughts his mind had turned into.

 

_Are you—well?_

 

The words themselves sent a cold thrill down his spine, a new flavor of panic-and-dread to complement the crawling anxiety and queer sensation of being weightless. It made him want to punch something—his fingertips tingled with a want for violence, and he squashed it, ruthlessly. 

 

No, he wasn’t well. He hadn’t been well in months—possibly in years, if he sat down and spent some time brooding about it. But those were rarely words, much less an intonation, that he associated with productive, non-invasive conversation. That was a conversation he’d spent a hideous amount of time in the last months refusing to have with everyone--from the President herself to every busybody with enough guts to speak to him to his face. It was a conversation he barely could bring himself to have with the therapist he submitted himself to every two weeks.

But Scamander had never bothered with that sort of invasion before, and he simply couldn't mean what Percival's skittering nerves thought he might—it was so far outside the realm of decency to contemplate it that he was sure he'd never have to deal with the consequences of discovery. 

 

"I'm sure I have no notion of what you are speaking about," Percival replied, and cursed himself a moment later, hearing it, knowing distantly it wasn't the right wording to deflect suspicion, too tight and stilted, making it plain he had something to hide.

"I—well. The, ah, the plug you're, um. That I suspect you’re, ah. Wearing. It's too large? I only wanted to offer, a bit of privacy, if—but? You're...having a panic attack," Scamander realized, and the words were abruptly absolute truth; it was full-blown terror in his gut, the kind he’d felt in battle against Grindelwald, the kind he’d felt trapped to Grindelwald’s whims, hollow and helpless and drained.

"I—" He'd have stumbled, if he hadn't been rigid with discomfort. There was a buzzing in his head that reminded him of fainting and blood loss, and some panicked part of his hindbrain assessed whether his knees would stay corporeal long enough to make it out the door with the last secretary still maneuvering a tower of papers through it. “How—”

“You, well, you weren’t moving at all in your, um, chair—sitting, ah, a bit differently: um, rocked to the side. And there’s a hitch in your stride, Director, when you came in and, ah, now, which doesn’t seem to be, um, associated with the injured knee. You’re generally—a bit, ah, more animated than, than you were today, and you weren’t, er, didn’t seem to be really following the discussion.You’re also quite—quite pale at the moment. _Ah—_ ”

Hands caught at his forearms as his knees went liquid; the magizoologist didn’t manage to halt his descent, just eased it to something gentler, prevented him from re-shattering a knee that still hadn’t forgiven him for hitting the floor this morning. Muffling a scream to a sharp grunt left Percival barely the presence of mind to notice that Scamander had pulled his wand, flicked it to bar the door against inopportune interruption; he was kneeling, hands pressed into the pile of the carpet, head falling between his shoulders as his chest heaved fruitlessly against the pain.

 

There wasn’t any air, he thought, hazy, and yearned for the days when he’d been _afraid_ to die instead of half-heartedly courting it. Pain sometimes did this, dropped him back into the awful darkness, panicking and unable to understand his surroundings. Futile gasping didn’t drag in enough to keep his head from spinning, muzzy thoughts still trying to distract him.

 

There was no air. He shouldn’t have...

 

The quiet compression of the elastic bandage around his chest, the suddenly terrible weight of the plug in question

 

—the bone-crushing stress of _discovery_ —

 

“Okay, okay, that’s, alright. Sssh, Director, breathe—yes, you can, follow with me now, in, hold it—and out. Again, in, and now out, again.”

A palm cupped around his throat, his arm snaking up around Percival’s back so that fingers could find his pulse. Another pressed to his breastbone, kneading in rhythm with the guiding voice—the solid pressure of it, of the chest his shoulder was digging into, the careful touch at his neck, so different from what had happened in the dark--all of it was easing him back into his own body, tethering him there more firmly.

He hadn’t realized he was shaking, but now with an anchor, it became clear that he was vibrating; his teeth would chatter, if he hadn’t been panting through a jaw clenched so tightly it shot pain through his teeth.

 

The specific ache of penetration was a terrible focal point, throbbing maliciously as his body clamped in nervous, unsustainable waves. The plug was abruptly _exactly_ what Scamander thought it was: too large, too soon, panic-inducing, a far cry from what it was _supposed_ to do—combining with the constriction of the bandage, the pain, suddenly sharp, of knee and hands and still-healing curse wounds.

 

It was terrifying to know that someone knew, could have figured out it existed without his leave; it made his chest twinge, made his thready, rapid heartbeat gallop all the harder, battering against his elastic-wrapped chest.

 

“Director, you seem to be having—trouble, ah, calming down. May I loosen your clothing and remove the plug? I suspect it will help, but I’d--I’d like your permission. Please don’t feel you have to say yes, if the notion is alarming.”

Panic put the words in his mouth, a plea—get it _out of me_ —but the sensation of a tumble of begging desperation and rage pressing against his tongue—far too much like what Gellert Grindelwald had sometimes wanted from him in his captivity—kept his teeth clenched, so that all that emerged was a strangled sub-human whining sound and bobbing, half-conscious nodding.

Scamander shifted, and then dragged him closer, to press his face into the other man’s neck, panting into the fine wool of his coat—Scamander was properly dressed for once, a jacket over vest and shirt, instead of just his peacock-bright outerwear, the slick  of a bow-tie crumpling against the ridge of Percival’s nose.

 

It was infuriating, that his brain was capable of noticing all that, taking it in and running an almost-sane commentary on it, while his body acted like he’d just jumped off a roof and hadn’t yet hit the ground. Like he could reason himself out of it if he could just _pull himself together_ and _focus_.

 

His knee ached like it had been destroyed afresh, and--

 

_\--he trembled._

 

“Mammals sometimes appreciate contact during episodes of intense stress, especially highly social creatures like primates, but please don’t hesitate to pull away, Director, your comfort is paramount,” Scamander was telling him, the sound of his voice at once grounding—any hesitation disappeared when Newt had a frightened creature before him—and grating against the pervasive sensation of shame that choked Percival. How terrible, to know he seemed more hurt animal than man right now.

The hands on him shifted, redirected to his waistband, making such quick work of the buttons that it sent another shudder of rejection down his spine; brushing back the flaps of his jacket to free his suspenders. Percival gulped convulsively when his trousers wilted down his flanks, baring his skivvies—a whole-body clench at the surprise of that situation scrubbed the plug against his prostate in an angry bolt of violation. He grabbed for Scamander on a dry sob, ended up with a handful of suit coat and shirt, his knuckles pressing against ribs, and buried his face against Scamander’s chest like a child.

“Director, do you want me to stop?” Scamander inquired, one hand paused right at the threshold of his open trousers, the other moving to cup his head—Morgana’s tits, Scamander had ridiculously large hands.

 

 

Grindelwald’s had been smaller than his own, quick and vicious and sometimes deceptively gentle. The conjured ones had been all manner of sizes—he’d tormented Percival sometimes, telling him exactly _whose_ hands were on him—his aurors’, Seraphina’s, the younger Miss Goldstein’s, random No-majs off the street sometimes, sometimes criminals who’d been brought for interrogation. Someone’s—he hadn’t known at the time—called Credence. Never in person, of course; shadow copies that came out of the darkness and lingered on his skin for hours, until he couldn’t tell what was magic and what was madness.

He’d gulped like this when his aurors had found him in truth, frozen against the satisfaction Grindelwald gained when he thrashed; still and too stiff to be pliant, trembling in the dark, too weak from hunger and thirst to move, much less fight them off. (If he’d been a No-maj, he’d have been dead for days. If he hadn’t half-destroyed himself on the magical binds, his magical signature never would have been found.) They hadn’t even realized he was conscious, and he couldn’t exactly attest to his own wakefulness; he’d drifted in and out of fever dreams for days, waking properly only to hurl what scraps of magic he could muster through the binds against the wall in the weakest, most instinctual form of Aguamenti he had ever cast. It had taken the medics days to figure out how to remove the blindness curse, and nearly two weeks further to work out how to remove the draining hexes—recovering from them enough to leave the hospital had taken months.

 

And—he couldn’t see. If he didn’t reach for his magic, it couldn’t flicker weakly out of the way.

If he didn’t lash out, Grindelwald probably wouldn’t break his hands, but he would gloat and croon.

 

His leg was already too broken to hold his weight

 

—if he stayed very, _very_ still—

 

“Director. Graves. Mister Graves. Oh crumbs, you’ve stopped breathing. Percival? Percival, ah, there we are. Percival, breathe with me now—good man, just like that, good, now follow mine, in, and out, in—out. Here, you can feel,” he said, and tugged Percival’s fist loose from where it yanked at Scamander’s clothes to flatten instead over the crisp linen of his shirt, feeling the lean flat warmth of his breastbone through the cloth, the cavernous ridges of his collarbones. “Try to follow that rhythm, Director. Shall I take the plug out? Yes, yes, alright,” he murmured when Percival choked out a _yes_ , and there was a ridiculously large hand sliding under his clothes, shoving them down-- 

“What the—a compression bandage. Well, no wonder you can’t breathe. Let’s get this out of you, Mr. Graves, and then we’ll discuss that.”

 

He couldn’t prevent himself from clenching when Scamander’s fingers found the base of the plug, nor the spasming jerk when clenching turned into agony against his prostate, the horror that his own stupidity might force him erect in front of someone, force him to come in his pants, displayed on the floor like the wanton Grindelwald had forcibly encouraged him to be. Percival sobbed at the notion, inevitably clenching again. The hitching of his ribs, airless, nearly soundless, only emphasized the crushing sensation, the phantom ache of snapping bone and agony.

 

“Shh, shh, shh,” Scamander soothed, getting a hold on the base with just his finger tips. “There we go; there we are, almost done, Director, just a jiffy.”

It wasn’t, exactly, just a jiffy—Scamander was far more careful with him than he had any right to expect, smoothly twisting the plug out,  murmuring quietly when his attempts to assist, to push, just compelled the thing back in, erasing the minimal progress and delivering another sound jab to his abused prostate. But out it came, slowly, until his hole clamped angrily around nothing, and there were tears smearing on his cheeks, still hidden against Scamander’s chest.

Scamander put it down next to his wand, and then used the wand to clean it, and him—not entirely necessary; Percival used all the appropriate spells for mucking about with such things, and used them fastidiously, but the gesture was kind, and the brush of intimate magic gentle and warm.

 

It made him cry harder, of course. Because he was a fool, and his clumsy attempts to manage his own trauma quietly had inconvenienced Scamander _so_ far outside the bounds of propriety, and he was desperately ashamed of _needing_ help for simple things—(he couldn’t quite manage the open-cases records closet any more, the close dark space too tight, too thick with dust, and sending Mrs. Colon felt like _cowardice_ every single time)—much less the sort of complicated tangle of human oddities that arose after captivity by a madman had awoken such a deep need to be touched that he’d resorted to gadding about MACUSA with a plug up his ass, giving himself panic attacks—and Scamander had been kind about it, which was almost worse than being laughed at, the way Grindelwald had laughed at him.

 

Big hands were adjusting his clothing again, while he hiccupped and choked over crying, too breathless to do it properly, and it wasn’t more than a moment before he was kneeling on the floor, listing into Scamander like he’d had his spine liquefied, sobbing and half-bare with his shirt hanging open, his trousers hitched up but unbuttoned, the steady release of pressure making him gasp and gulp as air returned like a miracle, leaving him dizzy and disoriented.

The bandage joined the plug as full-body shudders took him over, as quick fingers tripped over his buttons, and tucked him back into his tailored suit of armor, left him fully covered, sartorially rumpled but politely decent, and feeling…anything but.

There was a rush of magic—the first wandless magic he’d seen Scamander do, actually, summoning the infamous case to hand.

“Not to, ah, to rush you, Director, but I think it might be best if you had a bit of privacy...”

 

He barely responded, nodding blindly through tears and the swamp of shame, the only sounds he could make were gasps and the thin vibration of keening grief.

 

Of course Scamander had to go, he could never have expected to end a staff meeting with the Director of Magical Security collapsing in a puddle of wanton, emotional weakness, needing to be soothed, disrobed and manipulated like a doll to fix the hidden mistakes of his psyche.

 

Pulling himself together was delayed by choking on a wave of desolation: of knowing he’d be alone again in another moment, that even with this being one of the last ways he ever wanted to be touched, it would be ages before he’d feel anything like it. The agony of it warred against the fear of public humiliation for worst outcome in his head, the illogical and crippling worry that Scamander would say something to someone, and in a few short hours, Percival would have to relive the endless talks about his utility, his suitability, his ability to be what MACUSA wanted him to be. He’d come painfully close to collapse the last time; too anxious to eat, sleep a terrible series of snatched hours spaced between furious attempts to prove himself, self-abuse layered over Grindelwald’s damage.

Only this time, he certainly isn’t going to manage it—MACUSA tolerated only the most limited of weaknesses; they would eject him for certain, strip Director away, take the badge that marked him an auror, perhaps they’d even manage the civility of shaking his hand when they left him standing at the door with a small box of his meager personal effects, effectively homeless because the only home he’d known for decades now was the halls of the investigations and security department and he didn’t know who he was under the auror, under the man who’d trained himself to hold together the many threads of magic and bureaucracy to keep magical America functioning.

Or maybe they wouldn’t even manage that civility—the storm of a dishonorable discharge would kill him, and it wasn’t likely that heartbreak was as fast a death as the stress heart-attack he’d once envisioned before he learned real terror’s icy grip. He’d never wanted to die like his father: drunk on whiskey and grief, hopeless and so dismally exhausted of his politician’s life and his wife’s loss that not even Percival could tell if he’d intentionally Apparated in front of a train or merely been too inebriated to realize. He wasn’t sure he wouldn’t, if he found himself forced out because some fascist Dark-bleached foreigner thought Americans had the most reactive No-maj and broke him, trying to achieve his dark ends—if his own people saw only damage, after failing to see him entirely for months.

 

(These weren’t new thoughts--every one of them had come to him, through hours in the dark, when he was able to think around the horror of being touched by nothing but a madman’s magic. He’d thought all sorts of things, in the dark, had spent empty hours of torment trying to reason through all the many ways it was going to end.)

 

 

He’d thought, in the dark, that he might die like his mother, body shutting down slowly and painfully, life leaching out of them both like oil from a cracked lamp, to stain the wood beneath it. But not like his mother—he’d been alone, was grateful, in many ways, that he had been alone. And she had never been alone, not once since marrying his father in the summer of 1880, and certainly not on her deathbed, _her boys_ attendant and trying to smile through the tears for her.

 

 

 

The deep wash of magic gulping him down made him jerk and struggle, a hand flying out instinctively with a shield charm like a bullet-proof soap bubble, and he couldn’t breathe again, darkness ringing his vision in terrifying ways, dragging him down, the sounds Scamander was making going insensible, ringing like a bell in his ears. He wasn’t just going to fail himself and his country this time, he was going to get Scamander killed; it would be his fault and his alone, and he couldn’t bear it, not again.

 

 

He blacked out for a moment, too little air and too much fear, but only a moment, the space between one heart beat and the next in Scamander’s thin chest. He blinked awake too woozy and confused to struggle. It was enough to let him feel as Scamander hauled him bodily from the floor of wherever they were, onto a softer, plusher surface. The light was weird, no longer the grey-washed magical lighting of MACUSA’s boardrooms, but flushed gold, like evening daylight. It smelled different, too, dust and beasts and the multitudinous handfuls of herbs drying in the rafters.

“Where,” he managed to choke out, because the specifics of his panic kept shifting, but the feeling was still enormous inside of him, crushing the breath out of his chest cavity.

“Just the case, Director; you’re entirely safe and we’re still in MACUSA. Just,” Scamander ducked a rueful look at him from under a cloud of copperish fringe, “a bit more privacy. Ah, no, let’s have a breath now, Director,” he continued, quite calmly as Percival’s attempt to apologize for the imposition choked him, left him gagging and gasping around another swell of fear. “And you can let the Shield Charm down, there’s no danger here.”

There were arms bounding around him—actually, he was reasonably certain he was not only cradled against Scamander’s chest but properly in his lap; long lanky legs bracketed his, the brown dragon-leather of his boots ancient and butter-soft looking. His magic released the charm reluctantly, slinking away from it like a chastened cat. His eyes darted, entirely without his leave, returning to those boots like a lode-stone as they found escape routes.

 

“Your boots are dragon leather,” he said, and some part of him was immensely cheered when it came out almost normal, only a bit hoarse, a bit breathy. The rest…well, the workshop had at least two doors and two windows that would serve nicely as exits, and bringing the ceiling down would probably hurt, but it would certainly provide an additional way out.

 

Once he was out, maybe the Nundu would do him the great favor of eating him.

 

Dragon leather boots seemed odd on a man so explicitly against poaching.

 

“Oh? Oh, yes, it’s essential for working with some of my creatures. And, well, it can take decades for a dragon’s corpse to break down in the environment if wizards don’t, you know, recycle. Very little eats a dragon, you see, the protective magic really is stupendously strong, so if they fall near a water source, it’s just, well, chaos, really. It’s a concern with them being poached, you see; not only does it fling the populations into disarray and misalign breeding flights for any number of seasons but poachers just leave them once they have what they need. Two years later, Muggles can’t drink the water, crops fail; it’s bad news, really. So, these, these are, what do they call it, ah, sustainable, I think? Or, responsible, I’m not sure; one of the reserves has a tracking system and a brand-name, of all things.”

Scamander’s hands moved as he spoke—Percival had noticed it before when the man got going; when particularly impassioned, he was a danger to himself and others—but they never left his body now, sweeping long strokes of contact over his chest and shoulders, coaxing his arms to loosen, his head to fall back against Scamander’s shoulder.

He was exhausted all of a sudden, panic draining away like blood from a wound, and taking every scrap of energy in his body with it. Very subtly, he could feel Scamander’s calming spell—wordless, wandless, just a thread of raw magic, under exquisite control—winding around him like a friendly cat. It didn't feel at all like Theseus' magic, really.

“Actually, the boots, my vest—I have a vest, too, and the case itself all came from the same dragon; she was a lovely old girl from Ukraine, just superbly ancient. Her second to last clutch were the dragons the Brits flew in the war, really remarkable creatures.”

“I remember them,” Percival murmured, “Your brother nearly gave himself an aneurysm first time they flew over us. Nearly clocked a corporeal for trying to stun a dragon, especially one coming to save us.”

“Oh yes, Corporeal Nott, I recall. He made the man apologize after, too, not just to me but to Fedir as well. Nott didn’t have a good time of it.”

“Fedir was the particularly large alpha male, if I recall correctly, the one that liked to eat horses with their riders still on them. I’d never realized a dragon could laugh, before I watched him do it, with the colonel scrambling to get off. I don’t think the man ever recovered from that.”

“Well, he was a naughty creature, it’s true, but they wouldn’t let me use the deer to feed him, and beef gave him such terrible indigestion. He’s much happier on the north side of the reserve; he’ll be ready to start actually challenging the other males for breeding rights in another five years or so as he reaches his full girth. So, uh, not an alpha male, as such—none of those Ironbellies were fully mature, exactly, which was really the only reason we had the slightest hope trying to train them.”

“At last, I begin to understand the full scope of Theseus’s stomach problems. You couldn’t have been more than eighteen.” Eighteen and doing a far better job at wrangling his beasts than anyone that choked by military foolishness ought to have managed--Thee had spent most of the two weeks they were stationed together snarling at people to get out of little Newt's way and let him do the job they'd demanded of him. Percival had spent most of that two weeks ensuring that Theseus didn't end up court martialed or murdered back the brass.

“Seventeen, actually; I was born in February. They wanted to fly hippogriffs first, but not enough people could manage the bowing correctly, and Granians were too big for stealth.”

“So of course they switched to Ironbellies, which are just so delicate,” Percival remarked, and didn’t hear Scamander’s response, having fallen asleep.

 

 

“Yes, that’s exactly right,” Newt replied anyway, feeling the Director go entirely lax, and looked to the doorway. “Dougal, would you mind? I’d rather we didn’t stay overlong in the boardroom; his office would be better.”

Dougal regarded him with luminous eyes, and clambered up on the bed, to pet at Percival Graves’ hair—the demiguise grimaced at the feel of brilliantine (exactly why Newt didn’t bother with the stuff when he bothered with his hair at all, Dougal wouldn’t give up until it was gone) and applied himself with vigor.

Newt winced; the Director kept his hair longer now—unfashionably long, which was perhaps the only thing about the man that wasn’t impeccably _à la mode_ , but absolutely striking in its rebellion among so many staid and proper shorn heads. It was hard to blame him, since Grindelwald had evidently made quite free use of it for polyjuice and left him with a choppy, grown out mess. And, well, if he was anything like the desperately head-shy Lesser Zaltorog Newt had found in the Alps, with its great golden horns half sawn off, or any one of the unicorns he’d pulled out of potions labs—he’d probably come out of the experience with a dreadful fear of anyone touching his head. Hopefully he’d respond as they had as well—only wary of new contact, but accepting of an established, gentle touch.

Typically the long strands were slicked back into a neat knot with a rubber band, with the sides kept short with a simple spell, but he recalled from the incident with the salamander and an overzealous Aguamenti, that it stuck out like a Nundu’s throat when at liberty.The grey was coming in strong now, bright and silvery against the long dark strands. 

...It wasn’t going to resemble anything like a constrained and proper hair style when Dougal was done with him—an especially luxurious rat’s nest, perhaps.

All the more reason to hustle the case to the Director’s office—a Percival Graves wandering the halls looking that rumpled was likely to spark a panic.

“Thank you, Dougal, it won’t be long. Though I suppose I should do the evening feed a bit earlier, just in case, hadn’t I? Yes, I think so,” he murmured, slipping back up his ladder to shift his case.

 

 

0-0-0-0-0

 

 

It wasn’t what he could properly call dark when he woke, opening his eyes to the same raftered ceiling, the oil lantern that hung burning there. There were gentle hands in his hair—not human ones, he found, peering up into the ominously large eyes of a demiguise—and a solid weight across his hips that turned out to be a very young Cerberus crup, the sort that grew into fifteen foot tall devil dogs.

“Young Mathieus will be quite delighted to let you up, of course, but may attempt to compel you to play a bit of fetch if you wake him. He can be very persuasive,” Scamander commented from a chair at his ankle; a long-fingered hand patted him gently on the calf before returning to the crochet needle in his hands and the long silvery skein of fur in his lap.

“Dougal, however, is not going to happily allow you to go until he’s finished with your hair, and there is simply no dissuading him, particularly since you keep it long, nearly as long as a Demiguise’s pelt. Demiguises cannot abide by having a dirty coat, and unfortunately brilliantine is very much like sap in his mind. You might switch to Sleekeazy’s, if you plan to make a habit of letting him do that; Potter’s stuff doesn’t upset him nearly so much. It does, however, mean that he likes you enough that he’d rather you weren’t eaten by a Sumatran tiger.”

“Niffler,” and with that he turned stern eyes to a bundle of warm curling up beside Percival’s ribs, “is trying to work out how to pick your pockets. Your anti-theft charm is giving her a bit of trouble.”

“What time is it?” Percival croaked, and licked his lips to try and coax some moisture back. Scamander stood, and collected a glass of water off the worktable at his side, fitting it into his hand with a word to his demiguise to let him up enough to drink.

It tasted faintly of mint and ginger, and that was somehow incredibly comforting—he could barely stand to wake dry-mouthed and thirsty anymore, the sensation was enough to spark its own weak spurt of fear in his chest—he had nearly broken himself scrambling out of bed more than once in the months since Grindelwald.

“It’s gone half-five; you’ve slept only about two hours. I imagine you could probably do with another ten to twelve, though I’d advise you eat something before then; to that end, you’re quite welcome to join me, though I keep a—rather more Continental meal schedule then perhaps you’re used to.”

“Auror. I’m lucky if I eat before ten most nights. Thank you,” Percival replied, and didn’t resist when Dougal the Demiguise guided his head back down to be groomed. It felt as good as it did weird, and that was a far from exceptional set of circumstances in Scamander’s company. “Are we still in the boardroom?”

“No, I’ve shifted us to your office. I figured it would be more comfortable, should you—want to retreat to, you know, your own space.”

The thoughtfulness was pang, warmth filling the chilled hollow that was lingering in his chest. The action, though, was very much against Department policy. “Mrs. Colon allowed that?”

“Oh yes, I told her that you and I had a report to go over before I checked on the crup-farming situation in Akron, Ohio, and that you’d stepped out for a last minute issue at one of the on-going case sites. Promised I’d be fine, just needed to finish up evening feeding. She waved me right in. It helps, I think, that I had Prometheus with me,” Scamander said, and darted a quick glance at him before stroking a light fingertip at the little ashwinder tucked round his neck inside the open collar of his shirt. “But she’s asked if I need any coffee or tea a few times,” he offered, like that made it alright.

“Goddamn security nightmare, you are,” Percival grumbled at him, wondering if it was a betrayal, treason of some sort, to feel so warm toward a man who regularly contorted his laws and procedures into pretzels.

“Yes, well,” Scamander smiled at him, “It may also have been because I asked Queenie Goldstein to bring by a box from Kowalski’s.”

“Menace,” Percival complained, without heat, and winced when Dougal tugged a snag in his hair for the first time.

“There’s two Wampus shortbreads for you,” Scamander said, as if he hadn’t heard. “Which are upstairs, to keep them away from greedy creatures.” Another pointed look at the Niffler, who was suddenly wiggling a bit, unburying her face to sniff delicately at the air. “Shortbread is no fit meal for a lady in your condition,” he told her with a Dumbledorian air of gentle finality.

“There is no crup-farming situation in Akron,” Percival said.

“No,” Scamander replied, with no discernible change in tone or bearing. “Not anymore.”

“I thought we’d agreed you’d inform Major Investigations before running raids. You know, so that we can get a damned legal conviction.”

“Your extension office is aware, I imagine the report will be on your desk by next Monday. Your branch head in the Great Lakes area is fostering a lovely brindle pup, to the delight of her children.”

“How many of these devil dogs are out in your case, Scamander?”

“Oh, a dozen or so. Roger and Anita still have a litter too young for new homes, as well as a few of the last litter yet. Mathieus is the runt of them. I thought we agreed it was easier if you called me Newt, so that Theseus’s Taboo curse wouldn’t go off. Now you’re going to get a transatlantic floo, and I’m going to be buried under a mountain of letters demanding I go home for Christmas.”

“Newt,” he agreed, and then, “He hasn’t followed through with his threat to just switch the Taboo to your first name?”

“No, he likes to be able to track me and know when his subordinates are complaining in the pubs again simultaneously.”

“Paranoid bastard,” Percival said, with great affection, and then flinched under the direct look Newt gave him. There was a reason why Newton Scamander didn’t often make eye contact—ambush predators worked by surprise.

“Director,” and there was that Dumbledorian quality to his inflection again, patient and wry and unyielding. “Perhaps you’d care to theorize on why you seem to be suffering from what—in a creature—would be a panic-inducing level of touch starvation?”

“I, uh, wouldn’t, really, no,” he prevaricated. Wasn’t it amazing, how different this man was in his own domain? It was fascinating, to be sure, how confident Newt Scamander was when he made the rules and held all the cards. He’d rather face down a hungry Nundu than Newt right now.

“I understand. You may want have a good excuse for Theseus,” Newt replied with great equanimity, “when he inevitably works out there’s something wrong, and decides to rearrange the world to correct it. Knowing him,” Newt continued, darting a wry sideway glance over, “that scenario will involve Seraphina Picquery descending hourly for Magickdom’s most awkward hugs for the foreseeable future, or something equally bothersome. She apparently feels quite guilty, or so he tells me, so I’m confident he’ll manage to convert her to his way of seeing things—he usually does. You perhaps ought to—take advantage of that, before Theseus does; you’re probably facing forced vacation time as it is. He’s mentioned Christmas a few times.”

There’s an ‘or’, there, not spoken but in every line of his body. Or you can tell me, trust me, Newt didn’t say, and I’ll try to help you. Percival had watched him manage any number of solitary predators and herbivorous megafauna exactly the same way.

“Have you been to Scotland recently?” Percival enquired, a hint of desperation betraying him. Albus Dumbledore was the worst manner of politician—the sort that hadn’t been officially elected or appointed to anything and didn’t answer to anyone, but drifted through committees and policy-making on the gentle swell of charming popularity, manipulation, and power, rearranging things as he wished—and that ever-present faintly-lecturing equanimity put Percival’s teeth on edge: honeyed superiority honed to a diplomat’s keen edge, that coaxed out private information or demanded it depending on who he was managing,and brushed aside consequences to be someone else’s problem.

 

(He was exactly what Percival might have been; without his father, without the strict discipline of command and the structure of the aurors and watching the consequences of powerful people manipulating the lives of others—of No-maj’s falling under cruel wizards and wizards falling under cruel No-majs and everyone falling under both. That scale of manipulation, the arrogance that fueled it, was going to do what it always did: get someone killed.)

 

Prying was a kinder look on Newt: Dumbledore had never yet let a detail go that might one day prove useful, but Newt--Newt’s way was to reappear two months down the line with some useful token—anything from a highly illegal therapy creature to a miracle wound salve to a rambling account of some tribal wisdom long over-looked by Western wizards. If there were some cure for Percival’s woes, it would be Newt Scamander who found it—it was a shame there wasn’t any cure-all for the aftermath of torment and fear and bitterness.

Besides, it wasn’t like Percival could exactly complain about Newt’s Dumbledorian mein—whatever tutelage Albus provided during Newt’s infrequent visits to Scotland, he came away from it better able to assert calm confidence in the face of gross humanity, and wrap his tongue around the sort of twisting language that enabled Percival to harness all that passion and arrange to put him in witness stands as an expert. The satisfaction of watching smugglers and abusers actually feel the sting of justice stood only second to the shine in Newt’s eyes when he realized that it was his testimony that had made such a difference.

 

“Two weeks ago, yes; Thee mentioned I was sounding like Albus, which just means that Theseus is feeling guilty himself. He’ll make me drag you home for Christmas as well if he catches wind,” he added, stacking threats like poker chips, and waited.

No promise of leniency if he submitted to those conditions, Percival noticed, but it didn’t seem to matter. Honestly, it was embarrassing, how quickly the Director of Magical Security would break under the patient, expectant silence of a man who only narrowly skirted the title of criminal and carried sunshine in his luggage.

“What else,” Percival snarled, feeling cornered, “Grindelwald, of course.”

“Director,” Newt said, the tone of his voice gentle, but anything but _soothing_.

“Oh come off it, _Newton_ , you’re not going to sit there and call me Director while I bare my fucking soul,” he snarled, and nearly managed to sit up before Dougal shifted around to hulk at his temple, peering reproachfully down at him. There was even the ungainly shift of the puppy in his lap, the sleepy roll of weight and a heavy sigh before he went back to blissfully shedding on Percival’s pants.

There was a knot of something thick and slimy lodged in his belly, at the idea of discussing the predicament Newt had found him in—shame and fear, mostly, as well as plain embarrassment. They were the same emotions that drove him to even entertain the idea of talking at all: Newt Scamander had helped him. The absolute least Newt deserved was to know why that was a situation he’d come across, like some sort of combined apology and retroactive consent--and their connection was something a little more intimate than the absolute least demanded, between the War and Theseus and Gellert-fucking-Grindelwald. But slimy emotional feelings left Percival angry and unsettled, and condescension, however deserved or well-intentioned, felt like chewing tinfoil.

 

He’d been a cop for a long time, he _knew_ exactly how madmen like Grindelwald twisted their victims around. He knew better, in his right mind, than to allow it—knew to fight against trust issues that could leave him a crippled mess, knew to reach out despite every aching pound of weight that piled onto his shoulders at the idea, knew to talk, even if the words tasted like blood and bile. Knew, as the Director: all the experts agreed, from the Healers, to the psychiatrists, and the specialists, that building a support network was vital for victims of violence—and triply so for victims that were going to be involved in any sort of further law enforcement. Knew, as the patient of one of those experts (what was good for the goose was good for the gander—he’d never tell his aurors to see a shrink and shirk seeing one himself, even if he walked out of the office feeling stoic and wordless and cold to the core) that he needed to gather his friends to him, let them help him lean.

Knew, as an observant man, that his support network was a pitiful thing indeed—colleagues, the lot of them, trusted colleagues, but…no family to speak of anymore, no friends from school. The handful of lovers he’d taken over the years were politely distant. Theseus was only barely an exception—a friend he saw officially more often than recreationally. Seraphina, when he trusted her enough to act as a friend and not his boss, who should have been close enough to realize, and apparently hadn’t. Theseus’s kid brother, now—hardly an exception either, except for—

 

—(how _he_ had known, somehow, when no one else had was a fact that regularly bounced through Percival’s brain, shaded in turn with a hundred different emotions—at least until Percival squashed that thought as both unfair and faintly obsessive)—

 

—how his face and hands and scent and manner occasionally sparked warmth low in Percival’s gut. Theseus’s kid brother was no child.

 

—Except for how it was Newt Scamander’s case he was lying in, exhausted from panic and embarrassment, eyes aching from tears and prickling with the threat of more.

 

 

He wouldn’t, a year ago, have said he was particularly unhappy with his social circle being primarily his work. He hadn’t, a year ago, realized that he had become quite so much a part of the Woolworth Building’s woodwork, unremarkable and so intrinsic that no one thought to look twice.

Grindelwald hadn’t been entirely wrong, to say he lived a sad life, divorced from any manner of intimacy, untouched and untouching.

Seven months from being dragged from the dark, still healing from bearing the brunt of a madman’s ideas of intimacy and power, he had to force himself not to shy away from emotional intimacy, even as he craved the physical.

 

“Percival, then,” Newt allowed, and rubbed an apologetic palm against his calf, separated by a thin layer of fine wool and the edge of a sock garter. “Something specifically upset you, I assume; you thrive on telling Congress to—to buzz off, and Picquery is feeling too guilty to make trouble.” He shuddered a bit, only slightly emphasizing it for theatrics—feeling guilty or not, Seraphina Picquery was a terrifying woman who had made a very specific sort of impression on the younger Scamander brother.

“No—well, yes, you’re not wrong. But nothing specific, no. Just. Broken brain,” he sighed, waving a falsely careless hand at the opposite temple from Dougal. Resigning himself. “Shell shock. Whatever.”

“And the plug—the bandage?”

“I—Fuck. The bandage is to help with the curse damage; but it…it helps, I suppose. The plug—hm. I can control when and how I deal with—sex. Normally,” he added, with sneering bitterness at the ache, the sharp pain, like that of forcing atrophied muscles to unclench. “Wasn’t expecting this morning to be….what it was. I wouldn’t have…shouldn’t have been so abrupt. It’s. Can’t exactly give myself a hug, can I? Doesn’t work that way—so pressure, and distraction.”

“So the plug acts as a—a placebo, something you can control, for touch?”

“Yeah,” he sighed. “Grindelwald…noticed something, when he was wearing my face. An opportunity, I guess, as well as a really good way to, ha, distract me. He liked to gloat, liked to twist things around—he realized that my aurors didn’t touch me—realized that Americans…don’t, really. I hadn’t really noticed it myself, but we don’t, do we?”

“Speaking as a British man, widely regarded as—rather odd,” Newt said, delicately, “No, Percival, Americans don’t touch very much.”

“No,” Percival agreed. “So he, he noticed that. And, hmm. Fixed it, I guess, to his mind.”

“He touched you without your consent, and spouted a bunch of lies while doing so,” Newt interpreted, and there was a note in his voice that Percival recognized from situations that upset the magizoologist; creatures hurt that he wasn’t able to immediately whisk away, people who hurt them that he wasn’t able to stop through fair means and didn’t yet have foul means to bring to bear.

It put a confusing twist of almost warmth and almost embarrassment in his gut alongside the cold grip of trauma, that someone—this someone, specifically—might feel protective of his comfort and wellbeing, without the furtive weightiness of guilt.

“More—more or less.”

“So he did worse than that,” Newt realized, and there was a definite growl in his voice now.

“Well…yeah, I guess. He didn’t usually—touch me himself, just—shadow hands. It shouldn’t have been so bad really; it wasn’t like the blinding curse, or the draining hexes. Just—touching. Didn’t hurt me, not too much, but…”

“But?”

 

There was a particular, dissociative sort of mindset to giving a report. An emotionless, objective recounting—it wasn’t true dissociation, just the sort of detached calm, a mental distance that made it possible to get through a hard report without weeping or choking, the sort of calm that let him sit in a witness stand, stare into the eyes of a murderer and speak of blood spilt and torture suffered and horrors enacted, and then have to wait for a jury to decide it if was enough without letting the curses and epithets fly from his tongue. It worked best all at once; shove the emotion away and spit out the report, like ripping off an adhesive bandage.

 

It saved him now.

 

 

“Look, he’d show up in whatever black little hole he’d shoved me in, which I couldn’t get out of because he’d slapped me with so many draining hexes that the hospital had to call in two specialists from St. Mungos and the Khovrinskaya. He blinded me—nothing more than a blindfold curse, but it’s _maddening_ —the time I nearly got the jump on him with my bare hands. Dinged me up, you could say. Like a No-maj automobile; a few more, anyway. Didn’t want to kill me—family’s too old and too pure, and I was worth more as a powersource for whatever he was siphoning off my magic for. And I was a captive audience, eventually; didn’t have much to say after a while. So he started gloating, right? And one of the things he gloated about was how repressed Americans are, how isolated we were, how alone I specifically was; so he said he’d fix it, yeah? Shadow hands—all sorts of people, my coworkers, perps, No-majs, all sorts—would just. Touch me. Sometimes it was sexual—such a _shame_ , wasn’t it, that inverts so rarely have children, that my line was going to die with me if he didn’t knock some poor woman up while using the Polyjuice—but sometimes it was just casual, or, or _intimate_. But I didn’t have any control over it and I couldn’t avoid it. And sometimes they…wouldn’t. He wouldn’t set the spell. And that was worse sometimes, ‘cause I couldn’t see, and it felt like I was going insane, because all I could sense was the floor and the walls when I found them, and I was--largely helpless. It felt like—like I had died, half the time, and hadn’t realized.”

He sucked in a huge breath, and didn’t say that there were still scars on his arms from where he’d drawn blood to convince himself he still could, and definitely didn’t say that when Grindelwald broke his hands it was punishment but it also became a focal point that kept him sane—because that felt like something that would hurt more than he wanted on the way out and he _didn’t want to_ and continued:

“I. I didn’t always realize when he was using polyjuice instead of transfiguration or a glamour—he didn’t always bother with doing anything more than taking what he needed, just left me to the shadow spells. So, alright, they found me—Delgato and Collins and Goldstein, specifically—and I didn’t realize, did I? Cause now I’m used to be touched randomly, and I can’t do anything about it—the only weird thing was that he had never bothered to really do other voices before, not properly. It was three days before I realized that I was back in friendly hands, and another four before they figured out how to fix my eyes—mostly, I still, I still need glasses sometimes, because that one lingers, _apparently_ , when it's been left on for a month and a half. And now I’m better, mostly, except—no one touches me. And I can see, it’s worse if I can’t, if it’s dark, but sometimes it feels like I can’t trust my eyes, like he’s managed to get the jump on me again.”

“So the plug helps, because it’s a touch you can usually control,” Newt concluded, while Percival recovered from the shock of having said almost the whole of it, reeling and weightless under the bulk of a Cerberus crup runt and the careful hands of a demiguise, a magizoologist’s hand rubbing soothing circles on his ankle.

“It’s worked for—months,” Percival said, “Helped me keep the—anxiety, manageable. I think I just—rushed it, today.”

 

He’d woken late and panting from a terrible nightmare, shocky and too nauseous for food. If it had been anything but meetings and paperwork all day, he’d never have risked it, but staying home was a hundred times worse than going into the office, and he’d needed to be _grounded_ to go anywhere without crumpling.

 

“Grown men, and especially the Director of Magical Security, does not get to randomly touch people to assure himself he’s real,” Percival mused, contemplating the rafters again and wishing the crup puppy had settled on his chest instead so that he’d have an excuse for why oxygen didn’t seem to be at its normal concentration in the atmosphere.

 

“Well, not randomly, no,” Newt agreed. “So find people who you can trust to touch you, to ground you. It doesn’t sound like it has to be sexual, only contact, or am I wrong?”

 

“That’s…that’s where the trust issues come into play,” Percival admitted, wishing Dougal would hurry up and finish so that he could flee this conversation, retreat to his office and wolf down his cookies and hide from the entire mess of it. “No, it doesn’t need to be—sexual. I told you, I can manage that part, mostly.”

“You’ve been lying here for nearly three hours, Percival, and you’ve let me and my creatures touch you with abandon. I’ve seen you accept handshakes and shoulder-claps from subordinates—Queenie Goldstein touches your shoulder every time she brings you coffee, because your shoulders drop a full inch for an entire hour when she does it. My brother has hugged you in front of world leaders; from before, I’ll grant you, but there’s a picture of it on your wall, Theseus kisses your cheek in it half the time, if he thinks it’ll scandalize someone. He does it every time he sees you—and the real him, he’s worried how thin you were, the last time—he asks after you when he writes. Do you imagine that you have no friends, no one who would be happy to help you? Because you’re wrong,” he added, without allowing a pause where Percival might have tried to interject. “You’re wrong.”

“I—saying no would be churlish,” Percival said, “but this—it isn’t like bumming a cigarette, or talking through a case.” 

“Isn’t it?” Newt asked, “I don’t see why it shouldn’t be.”

“There wouldn’t be…I can’t—it would put people in danger,” he said finally, “making it seem like I had that sort of relationship with them.”

“What manner of relationship are you talking about,” Newt asked, “because I admit I am confused, Director.”

“A—one that, you know. With touching.”

“Merlin’s beard,” Newt said, and didn’t toss up his hands, because the one was still rubbing shapes into his ankle, but sounded just like Theseus when he tossed his hands out wide in disgust, and that was a strange thing to draw comfort from, but there it was. “That runs the gamut of—of casual friendship to romantic soulmates, Percival; even I know that and most people think I’m a four-cross on the magical creature regulation scale, four and a half if I’m giving a lecture.”

A very specific indignation flared—the ghost of Theseus from years ago, from war-time, raging that people were far crueler than odd little Newt deserved. “That’s—”

“Entirely true, I’ve conducted a study,” Newt dismissed with a waved hand, which immediately came back to his leg, hushing another protest. “Even the most introverted amongst us need contact,” Newt murmured, gently.

“I know that,” Percival grumbled. He looked away. “He threatened to—do to my staff, what he was doing to me.”

 

The distance that had damned Percival to replacement had saved his colleagues—no one had seemed too close, too observant. The ones that had seemed too obvious, Grindlewald had transferred early on--by the time he'd gotten around to sadistic mind games and threats, there wasn't anyone left who might have suspected and it had saved them--the memory, thick and terrible, of Grindelwald ticking off subordinates on spindly white fingers, _not Delgato, not Picquery, not Williams, not even little Tina Goldstein, poor Percy, does no-one love you? Aww. I could teach them to, you know, I bet they’d beg for the chance to touch you, if only to make it all stop, hmm?_ \--and he had to be grateful for it but it felt like _strangling_ —

 

 

Was he so indistinguishable from a Dark Lord? Was he such as failure as a Director that the men and women he’d trained were so blind? Or was it only that Grindelwald was exactly as cautious and evasive and charming as the reports from Europe had said and they hadn’t known to brace against it?

 

 

“I’m sorry,” Newt said, sounding it—and as ever, sympathy put an uncomfortable twist in Percival’s belly. “I’m sorry for all of it, but I’m especially sorry he did that, because he never could have followed through. Not and kept up the charade—even he knew that.”

“He tormented the Barebone boy to his death, wearing my face.”

“I know,” Newt said, and Percival could have wept for gratitude, that he didn’t excuse it, didn’t wave away the murder of an innocent—a _tormented_ —young man at the hands of a madman and Percival’s own people, didn’t diminish the righteous weight of grieving guilt in his chest for that. “I’m sorry for that as well.”

 

Well, perhaps he did know what they felt, when they couldn’t keep the pity and guilt out of their faces, because he would surely do the same if Barebone sprang back to life.

 

But Newt hadn’t actually finished speaking, and slipping away into the guilt he felt for Credence Barebone’s demise was a task of hours.

 

“As I see it, Percival—and, I—perhaps you might think of taking your advice from someone a bit more experienced with, ah, human issues, but, as I see it, you must allow the people you trust to help you, to be not only colleagues but friends. Or--or find—a lover, someone who you can permit to touch you liberally and often—and hope that it’s enough when your work is, um, stressful.”

“That’s—frank,” Percival managed, still reeling slightly, torn between guilt and a sudden surge of hot _want_.

“Percival,” Newt said, pointedly enough that Percival blinked. Apparently the time for gentleness had passed. “I have a thousand examples of how human beings are some of the most prudish, complicated creatures on the planet when it comes to contact, to sex. I can introduce you to about two hundred of them now, if you’ve an hour to spare. If you come back in two days, the Fwoopers will provide a demonstration.”

“Ah, no, thanks, that’s. That’s not necessary. I’m not—a prude.” What was his life, that he’d just found himself saying that to Newt Scamander?

“I am—far from the right person to pass any judgments,” Newt decided, and oh, _now_ he's blushing. “Nor is that what I intended to do. But I think that this is not necessarily as complicated as you’re making it.”

“It’s. It feels like…an imposition.” If people…if people wanted to touch him, felt comfortable with the notion, they would say, wouldn’t they? He’d know?

 

He’d not have been replaced so easily, so seamlessly, by a man with more ambition than acting skill—if anyone had wanted to touch him?

 

He’d not find himself now torn between a hundred fears of the mechanics of intimacy and a craving for it anyway lodged in his bones, if he had been used to it before Grindelwald set out to torment him?

 

“How much effort does it take, to put a hand to someone’s shoulder? I can’t think of a single American auror who would begrudge it,” he looked Percival dead in the eyes again. “In fact, I dare you to suggest as much to Theseus.”

“Stop threatening to terrorize my people with your brother.” They were such pretty eyes—it was a shame he used them like weapons and hid them the rest of the time.

“Shall I terrorize them myself, then? Stop— _Implying_ that the people who like you would prefer you to feel anxious and alone, when they can help you so easily. And _will_ , at your word, at--the barest invitation.”

“I’m not—I’m sorry,” Percival corrected, because Newt’s face did something terrible, angry and sad and disappointed, and it slicked a coating of sick upset along the length of Percival’s esophagus, down to clamp cold hands around his stomach. “I don’t mean to.”

“Alright,” Newt agreed. He paused. “Sorry. I oughtn’t--oughtn’t have yelled.”

“I’d rather--please do not apologize,” Percival said. And now it was time for Percival to try, the tight knot of twisting nerves in his belly be damned. “If—if it seems appropriate, and you, you feel like it. Please, will you, engage in physical contact with—me,” is what he managed, and hated himself for sounding like the language in one of his father’s missives or one of his own business notes, like a contract, instead of a friendly invitation, instead of a heartfelt and sincerely meant _request_.

“Yes, of course I will, Percival,” Newt agreed, and treated him to a really painfully beautiful smile, one that had almost made the hell of this conversation worth it. “Thank you.”


	2. Part Two

 

So he was…doing a bit better now, in the months since his nap in Newt’s case; he hadn’t had a really bad panic attack in weeks, not since The Ghost tried to spring a surprise coming-up-on-a-year-Grindelwald-free exclusive on him with an undercover reporter in August; which he refused to give, and earned three days constant coverage with the ugly imprecation that he was against the free press.

 

He had steamrolled through the date that Grindelwald had taken him—taken him and trapped him in helpless darkness and _worn his face_ to wander about in—all without picking a fight or drinking himself to death (only in public, no more than one every hour and a half, and never at home), or locking himself in his office to indulge in a mental break down. In the lead up, he’d taken a few very, very long walks, and a few very, very hot showers.

 

The anniversary proper, he went to war—eleven hours spent shouting at Congress in what would come to be known as a landmark case, the first chink in Rappaport’s Law, a sea-change for MACUSA.

He spent the rest of it shaking like he’d been hit with a freezing spell. But. He was—fine. For a given value of fine.

 

For the most part, he didn’t need to ground himself with sex toys in the office and occasionally bleeding into his bathroom sink to make sure he still could—not most days. Most days, he’s alright with Queenie’s hand on his shoulder when she brought coffee, invited with a smile, a warmer word of thanks; Seraphina’s carefully casual layer of fingertips over the sleeve of his jacket, encouraged with subtle, almost courtly gestures he’d learned from his gallant father. A warm handshake to go with a word of praise when his aurors did well, though Goldstein the Elder still blushed like no one’s business, and Delgato and Lopez still tormented her about it mercilessly; O’Sullivan and Weiss could be relied upon to huddle shoulder-to-shoulder close during field briefings, and watch his back while he watched everyone’s.

But it left him with a new problem, one a bit sweeter than dissociative panic attacks that left him cold and headachy for days, but not less distracting. Sex was, as he’d told Newt months ago, something he could control, and control it he did—he was good with his hands and better with his magic, and he got on by himself just fine so long as he didn’t trip over the fact that he missed the weight and warmth of a romantic partner, or that learning how someone else ticked was a solid part of what made sex interesting. It was far easier to take himself in hand than it was to risk concussing a partner with wandless magic because they’d touched him when he hadn’t expected it. Infinitely easier than mustering the courage to make the overture at all.

But he wondered a bit, what it might be like, to add an element of non-control. To, perhaps, give over control entirely to someone else, someone who’d proved quite capable of taking him in hand and guiding him through the minefields his own brain could produce.

Someone…kind. And--gentle, though, perhaps 'controlled' might be a better word. It wouldn't hurt if it was someone whose Apparition times still regularly beat most of the European records, and left American records in the dust.

 

(The Major Investigations Department had an entire ream of regulations about who was qualified to go poking around investigation sites and crime scenes, and the over-arcing Security Office had an entire sub-regulation about consultants who were permitted to conduct raids.  

Newt had had no problems, passing the Apparition and Dueling portions of that qualifying process, even if Percival regularly had to hunt down his paperwork to get it in before the probationary deadlines could pass and lapse the retainership.

He was a ferocious dueler—it had taken them three days to convince him that really, yes, he must and they wanted him too, they did-- _damn it Scamander, join me in the gymnasium, you have ten minutes, leave your case and your coat in my office_ \--and then he put Thompson and Lopez in the dirt in five minutes apiece or less, managed a three-against-one in not much longer, and had lasted a full twelve minutes against Percival in a duel before succumbing to an Incarcerous designed like a massive butterfly net.

It served to remind everyone that the man had dueled a Dark Lord singlehanded for several minutes and with only Goldstein as backup for a dozen more, nearly a year ago, and had only improved since—and had funded at least one trip into and out of Asia entirely on the winning purses of dubiously legal Apparition races.)  

 

So. It was a new problem, because Newt sloped in every six weeks, or Percival whirled out in a rush of chilled air and magic, perhaps a rookie in tow, on roughly the same timeline, and seeing Newt was… 

Well, actually, it felt sort of like being hit with the softest, warmest hex he could imagine, right in the chest, that gradually slumped through his entire body. It was how he imagined Newt’s Kneazle felt, liquid in the case’s sunlight, draped bonelessly over all manner of hideous-looking edges, lolling like she’d tumble onto her head at any moment—only he’d rather like to examine the metaphorical drop for traps at the bottom because he’d never met a comfortable situation he didn’t suspect of something Dark and terrible. 

That warm, soft hex usually came with it the sweetest, most addicting rush of adrenaline and success he’d taste ‘til the next time, which didn’t exactly blunt his desire to see more of Newt Scamander. He thrived on forcing order out of chaos, solving the puzzles and playing the politics of his position in MACUSA could be brutally satisfying, managing the shades of grey that enabled wizards to survive in a country that enjoyed stories of their torture and death more than any others—he’d trained long and hard to make himself a person that could do the work, and he did it very well.  

But it was undeniable that there was a visceral pleasure to wading into a situation rendered starkly in black and whites, where evil was the sort that tortured small animals and good was a righteous man with fire-hued hair and gentle hands that called on him to lend his strength to the cause. A bolt of instant gratification, the sort of results that his usual work dragged out over years, condensed into a day or two of high-stakes investigation, a flash-in-the-pan firefight, and then a night of fetching potions and dodging claws to heal wounds and watch a broken animal seize their right to life. 

 

It was selfish, wanting him; it was why Percival had yet to do anything about it. Watched Newt and Tina awkwardly shuffle around each other while the other aurors made much of an office romance that didn’t seem to be going anywhere fast. That was a shame, he thought, and dumped an antacid into his mouth to chew in punishment for the slick, heart-burn sensation of satisfaction. Tina wasn’t a terrible auror, and improved with every case. No one could doubt her sincerity, nor her passion for protecting the defenseless—though she seemed to struggle with describing the denizens of Newt’s case defenseless. Percival agreed, in part; no one sane made the claim that a healthy nundu or an adult thunderbird was defenseless, or that those ferocious creatures were rightfully terrifying. 

That fear shouldn’t give wizards a right to destroy the creatures, though, and it certainly didn’t give anyone leave to strip living creatures of their defenses for sport—and that sticking point was where he watched any romance fizzle and die between Tina and Newt.

 

(It was also why she didn’t usually get an invite to Newt’s raids; she’d put the pieces of the case together fine, and fight like a champion during the firefight, but turned stiff and thick-headed once the poachers or breeders were managed—Percival had only needed to see Newt get kicked in the thigh the once, trying to divide himself between staunching ripping wounds on a peryton’s flank and coax her into helping with basic wound care, for it to be enough. She was a whiz at first aid charms now, after a month of extra training.) 

 

So it was a shame, and maybe he’d have left it at that, except now he’d limp on home when Newt had swept off again, favoring the hand that had clasped Newt’s and conscious of a huge swathe of his lower back where Newt’s ridiculously large hand had rested at various points throughout the whirlwind interaction, to jack off furiously and contemplate, staring at the gently cracked plaster-and-paint white of his ceiling, how other portions of Newt’s anatomy might be as long and lanky as his hands and legs. Or how it might not be, and how he’d sort of like to find out if he kept that meek-and-gentle mask on, or took control the direct way, dropped the darting eyes and used his body to establish confidence. 

 

Newt, for his part, was very kind in his execution of the request Percival had so halteringly made of him.

Kind. And, well.

He had started by touching Percival—politely. Nothing that could possibly be misconstrued as anything other than the most restrained of touches—enough to remind him that he was awake, that he was free, that he had friends and wasn’t alone.  

Over the past months, they had morphed into something…different. Something still kind, and perhaps it was just kindness. But…increasingly intimate, something that put soft wanting thoughts in Percival’s head—the sort of touches that he associated with people unfashionably in love with their spouses, like his parents before his mother had died, the sort of touches that bled love and support and all the warm things that Percival would have wanted in a marriage and had never found and had thus never married. A guiding hand to the base of Percival’s spine, the unnecessary press of shoulder to shoulder in passing, a handshake that lingered long past when it should have been released, knee nudging knee when they sat beside one another—the automatic adjustment in his fighting style to Percival’s presence.

 

(Percival didn’t often reach for his wand outside of battle—oftener now, after everything, but it tended to stay wrapped up safe in its holster against his ribs, easy to hand but not needed—but Newt hadn’t even blinked at Percival’s wand sitting in his left hand; while his aurors goggled and muttered and tripped over themselves to get out of his way, apparently having entirely forgotten how to form a rank with a southpaw in their midst.

Grindelwald, it seemed, was not quite so good at wandless magic. Less surprisingly, the madman relied on magic to do mundane tasks excessively. His aurors had gotten quite used to seeing their Director wielding a wand in his right when he held a wand—and using magic for every mundane task that came to hand.

It seemed like there wasn’t an auror who hadn’t blinked at him at some point or another, when he stood to do something that magic might have done. He’d gotten used to ignoring the looks, because he’d trained every one of them in some way, and he never skimped on cautioning against over-use of magic—in a society that refused to think critically about their contact with no-maj, every spell was a potential Obliviation needed.

 

And they had forgotten.

 

And—standing up from his paperwork to fetch a cup of coffee or a reference book or a report was a right and a pleasure Percival held in remarkably high regard. He savored it to the fullest, stretching tall to realign his back while his hands moved through the routine of doctoring his brew or thumbing through papers. Walking places was a joy—a reclamation of time that the work would steal away, if one was unwary. An opportunity to reconnect brain and body.

It wasn't something he'd expected anyone to notice. But.

 

They hadn't.

 

“He favored his right; you use both hands—many who favor their sinister hand often do,” Newt commented, not looking up from fiddling with folding back a cuff that had gotten loose.

Percival had contemplated what made a person perfect, and whether exquisite observational skills were a valid addition to the Romantic Ideals and lean muscled forearms bared to free his movements, and then put that aside in favor of running several dozen drills until his aurors knew what they were about.)

 

But. Intimate touches and the feelings they were trying to inspire in him aside—because as much as he soaked in that kindness, as much as warmth rolled through him and his tension went loose and his brain untangled itself from whatever thorny nightmare it had tried to embed itself in, he reined those sensations in, kept them contained, tried, tried hard not to let himself properly fall in love with the man, because there were—things. The contra, to go with the pros.

Downsides. To consider.

Newt was thirty. Percival had a full decade and a half on him. It seemed…not inconsequential. Theseus was thirty-eight, and still felt remarkably young to Percival at times. Tina was twenty-six, and sometimes seemed like she’d hardly left school.

There were concerns, valid ones, when a wizard his age looked to someone so much younger for the sort of companionship he wanted—he’d side-eyed plenty of relationships with that manner of disparity, when they’d come up in Major Investigations, and made sure to ask specific questions about it.

He’d put disparities of that nature forward as evidence, a handful of times, and pushed for acquittal not just once on those grounds.

 

He had never imagined he might be that sort of man.

 

But age was ultimately a shallow hurdle. Dark magic tainting was quite a bit steeper a leap, and it was one he worried over like a loose tooth. The fact of it was, you simply couldn’t manage to have a field career as long and as ultimately successful as his—without even taking Grindelwald into account yet—without being exposed to all manner of magic, a good portion of it legitimately Dark Magic, and even more of it Grey Magic that had been well-within licking distance of Dark. It wasn’t for nothing that he periodically set off his own foe-glass, nor that Medical had all Aurors with his number of years on the force drink purifying potions every month like clockwork.

 

Newt Scamander did not need a man who rubbed shoulders with that sort of power wandering around, spooking his unicorns, upsetting the Occamies, and riling that fuck-off big runespoor he kept toward the back of the case.

 

He certainly didn’t need a man who suffered violent panic attacks (not so often anymore, true, but oftener than Percival would consider _safe_ ), slept on a schedule several healers had deemed ‘highly irregular’, ate when he remembered and not before (and usually, remembering was brought on by realizing that wand permits being misfiled was not a firing offense, much less one that deserved the chewing out that pushed at his teeth), and whose longest running relationship to date was with his coffee mug.  

 

 

(Not someone who could lie like breathing to manipulate people to do and say what he wanted, not someone who used force when manipulation didn’t work. Not someone whose entire career—whose entire line of work _as an institution_ —was one very tottery step away from absolute, mercenary corruption—Aurors were enforcers of law, and if the law was unjust….

He had tied himself, his morals, to the concept of justice. The Spirit of the Law, rather than the textbook reading--it wasn’t, after all, his job to Write or Read the law, or but to interpret it, use it. It was his job to keep the magical world safe. To manage the dozens of spinning plates that kept them a secret, kept them safe; like a No-maj magician, all sleight of hand and a careful study of human nature. He worked hard to find the criticisms of his work, to address them--casual brutality, after all, was a good way to start a war wizards simply had no chance of winning. But if he was wrong--if his judgement proved poor…if he let the wrong thing slip by, then not only had he failed, with all the consequences of that, but he’d failed the next case that wanted for just a scrap of mercy. 

He was very aware of it—the terrible tightrope act that existed, stretched taut between the sort of prejudice and basic human greed that all men struggled with, the kind that lead to corruption, and those that lay across a murky chasm of reality, the actions born of a drive to protect, the mistakes anyone might make in dealing with magic, in dealing with life--the sort of choices that were only mistakes because of how their forefathers had decided society ought to act.

If he didn’t catch the first, eradicate it, first in his own and then in his subordinates’ work, if he remained ignorant with it growing like rot beneath his feet or in his judgement—they were aurors for naught, and worse, were only tools to be picked up by people who sought the Dark. And if he failed to address the second, figure out how they might be used to propel their world forward, to progress, to be _better_ \--

 

What was the purpose of being Director as all? 

 

\--Good men, truly good men, did not seek this sort of power over others. Didn’t balance the fate of the magical world on their own judgement, and enjoy it.

They found other ways to defend their people, and didn’t harm others, intentionally or through their preventable mistakes.)

 

Besides. He could no more ask Newt to halt his crusade to save all the animals, to be cooped up in Percival’s apartment or even the Graves Estates, any more than he could give up his own work and settle cheerfully into domestic bliss—even in as exciting a domicile as Newt’s case. Barring another massive mishap, he had another two decades on the force easily, and generally looked forward to using them well. Even the most independent lovers rapidly became fed up with Percival’s idea of a normal workweek, and Newt had a mind-boggling number of animals in addition to his writing and whatever it was that a magizoologist did in the field when he wasn’t dueling abusive wizards—their lifestyles were largely incompatible with cute ideas of love and romance.

 

So that, really, truly, was going to have to be that.

 

(The finality of it sat so heavily that he just sat for a long time and breathed, feeling numb. Eventually he managed to get his hand to work well enough again that he could hold a pen and sign off on case reports, eyes skating over the words with just enough attention that he knew what he was signing, even if he didn’t entirely connect with them.)

 

0-0-0-0-0 

 

Theseus Scamander was having him to Christmas—and had threatened all sort of blustery violence in order to make it happen. Percival had very nearly managed to fend all that off, through a combination of excuses and lies.

Until he was sitting at Wednesday, staring down the anniversary of Grindelwald’s capture looming close on Friday—

 

(He didn’t mark it, he didn’t need to; he’d have the relevant dates carved into his soul for a good many years, and besides—The Ghost had run their anniversary article after all, pointedly noting he had ‘declined to comment’, apparently because of the stress, and it was all anyone had talked about for days now, his predicted mental break, and then shuffled away from him like he might start by cursing them.

 

Much more of that, and he might be tempted.)

 

—a short two weeks-and-change from Christmas, and Theseus pulled out his secret weapon once and for all: 

 

The memo rat climbed his waistcoat at half-past two in the afternoon, summoning him post haste.

 

At quarter to three, Seraphina Picquery slapped a month of forced vacation on him so hard his head spun, and had vowed to hex him senseless if he stepped foot in the office before the seventh of January.

 

O’Sullivan fell into step beside him when he stumbled out of her office, and dogged his heels to the door of his own office—Mrs. Colon made short work of the necessary paperwork that had been still on his desk, tied his scarf with a heavy hand, and marched him out with his mug clutched to his chest like a wound, to hand his custody back over to O’Sullivan, now joined by Weiss.

 

 

Seraphina met them at the door of the Woolworth building at three-fifteen, smiling to soften the blow and smoothing his coat’s collar, like a smile could ease the paranoid scrabbling at the back of his brain, the one that screamed he would never see the inside of his own office again, the one that wanted to shatter the mug against the ground in defiance of having his space taken from him, his choices stripped away.

 

 

 

(Revelio was no difficult thing to cast, wandless and wordless. The other spells he tossed against the glittering wall of her magic were…perhaps not so easy, but she didn’t so much as blink.

 At least he could be sure of the strength of the Wards of Office that hung on her, he thought with no little bitterness.)

 

 

He submitted to the exiling, because to resist was to make it clear to everyone in the lobby that there was a problem, and the only problem was the one inside him. This ought to have been a joke that he could bow gracefully to, was clearly intended to make him smile and give in, to cajole him into taking care of himself. Perhaps it was his own fault, that they didn’t know it was a nightmare he tended to wake whimpering and shaky from. 

 

 

But it felt like being back in a small dark space, knowing none of his colleagues knew him well enough to catch on to the fact that the man wearing his face _was not him_.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How exactly he got back to his apartment he wasn’t entirely certain—the whole of Lower Manhattan and Central Park sat between it and the Woolworth, and he was reasonably certain he hadn’t Apparated, because he’d have scattered himself in pieces across the length if he’d tried. So he must have walked, and really, that wasn’t a particularly sensible thing to do—eight miles in mid-December, while money was drying up in No-maj Harlem, and the No-maj police in Hell’s Kitchen with a reputation for such brutal vindictiveness amongst their own inverts that a wizard of the same persuasion would be wise to pay heed. And he had wandered through the whole of it, without having disillusioned himself beyond the lingering charms on his coat. There was nowhere in New York that it was exactly advisable to go walking in a daze.

So he wasn’t doing so well, when he stepped out of the dark frigid cold of New York in December, his coat flapping around his shins, three hours after he’d left the office, and mechanically climbed the stairs, wincing at the pull of calves that hadn’t been prepared for quite so much walking in unsuitable shoes, and a knee that throbbed like fire. He didn’t know how much it had to do with the fact that a year ago, he had been shivering in the dark someplace forgotten, hands throbbing in time with the ache of sexual violence and head spinning from hunger and magical drain, completely unaware that in less than a week, he’d be reduced even further, to licking water off stone walls and shredding his magic against the bindings that were doing their damndest to kill him.

He packed, because he wasn’t going to stay without work to distract him—his apartment was spare by _dis_ -inclination, and deeply depressing with no alternative to turn to; he kept few hobbies, and fewer mementos because the family estate had ridiculous piles of his ancestors' hobbies and mementos scattered about. He steadfastly ignored the pigeon bludgeoning itself against his window—he was on vacation against his will, he wasn’t going to respond to anything less than a true emergency—a fire call or a patronus.

 

He should invest in the sort of traveling home that Newt kept, he thought, and then dismissed it—he’d never leave his office, and there was value to knowing the streets of the largest city in the world.

 

Traveling case safely shrunk and in his pocket, the household spells and wards redoubled for his extended absence, wand stuffed up his sleeve in lieu of its holster at his hip, and his head still spinning but perhaps not so violently, he locked the door behind him and headed back into the dark streets. Perhaps a meal, before he made any further decisions that could prove disastrous.

 

Perhaps he’d spend a week battling mildew and drafts at the Graves estate.

 

 

0-0-0-0-0

 

 

He wandered around for the two weeks leading to Christmas. Spent days at the Graves Estate, snarling cleaning charms and fixing the wards from where Grindelwald had tried to get in before giving it up as a bad job, the sprawling house backed up to New Jersey’s Pine Barrens.

Spent more, contemplating the property his father had left him in Vermont, the one his mother had always called his ‘hunting lodge’ and was really more of a library of poetry and home-brew potions texts that she’d been fond of collecting smack in the middle of the woods. He’d had to get creative to keep the no-maj away from it when his father’s spells had started to fade, and would likely need to get more creative still. But that was little trouble—it gave him something to do.

 

Percival had made something of a grim game of dodging his correspondence—once the pigeons (and then the owls, as he got further and further from New York, and once a seagull) had found him, he unfolded himself from whatever armchair he’d located, set aside whatever reading material was keeping him from losing his mind in between intense bouts of home repair, and left.

 

When he ran out of Graves properties to hide in, he wandered No-maj museums with the intense and bitter focus of someone who had always meant to make time for them, and resented having had time made for him. 

 

(Maine was hideous in winter, the outer reaches of New York state somehow worse, and Chicago simply grey under a paltry six inches of snow.)

 

The start of Yule, he spent back at the estate. He didn’t light a log, because that was madness when he was expected in England for Christmas proper, but he did slog out into the woods to track down some holly, and cut some mistletoe with his mother’s old casting knife. It wasn’t a spectacularly cheerful way to welcome home the Sun, but it would have pleased his mother, and ham sandwiches were at least a passing nod to the traditions she’d passed along.  

 

 

The Director of Magical Security had a few privileges that came attached to the title; forced leave of absence or not, he was authorized to make portkeys, and he was still sufficiently annoyed that he preferred to risk ending up in the middle of the Atlantic than to return to the Woolworth Building—

 

\--he’d promised himself he’d take ‘til the twenty-eighth to nurse that grudge, and see how he felt then; not even he at his pettiest could stomach more than two weeks of well-deserved sulking--

 

\--and he might as well make use of Theseus’s jocularity if he was going to be manipulated into cheering up.

 

 

He arrived at Theseus’s doorstep at six sharp on Christmas Eve, glower firmly tucked behind a neutral mask—it broke into an unwilling grin at Theseus’s whooping cry and back-pounding hug.

 

“Where’ve you _been_ , old man? Come in, come in, there’s red wine or wassail,” Theseus practically dragged him in, an arm looped round his shoulders until he shifted to strip Percival of his coat. “Or, you know, the usual offerings. Supper’s not for another hour, I’m afraid—we keep—”

“Continental hours, yes, I’m aware,” Percival rumbled, and ducked a heavy velvet portiere as Theseus pressed him into a parlour. “Ogden’s, if it’s not too much trouble. Ladies,” he gave a passable half-bow, “Mr. Scamander. Ms. Goldstein,” with considerably more warmth towards Newt, who had tucked himself into a corner with a crystal toddy mug cradled against his chest, and who looked to him with wide eyes, direct for once before they darted away, and Tina, who was sat on the sofa looking a bit tight through her cheeks, the way she did when she had to interact with diplomats, particularly rude ones. “I hope you’ll forgive my tardiness.”

“Of course, of course,” Theseus blustered. “Mother, Leta, darling, this is my very good friend, Percival Graves. He serves as the Director of Magical Security for MACUSA, in America.”

“Mr. Graves, of course, Thee has said so much about you,” the smaller, darker woman purred, extending a hand. Newt, across the room, shifted again. His mother, a tall stately matron with streaks of silver threading through her auburn hair, sat regally beside the young interloper, barely flicked an eyelid at the poor manners, and smiled in response to Percival’s inquiring glance, to signal her tolerance of the gaffe.

“I’m gratified, Ms…” he shook it, briefly, and looked to Theseus.

“Percy, this is Miss Leta Lestrange,” Theseus introduced them, and drew Miss Leta Lestrange up to kiss her soundly on the cheek, to her obvious pleasure. “We’re to be married.”

“Congratulations are in order, then,” Graves replied, smiling, but he noted that Newt shifted again in his corner.

Introductions continued for several minutes more, to give Mrs. Scamander her proper due, and verbally wend his way around Leta Lestrange’s heedless conversation style to eventually greet Tina—he was cut off again before he managed to do more than nod to Newt.

 

It wasn’t until the supper bell chimed that he was able to beg a moment to greet Newt—with a lingering handshake, and a guiding hand at his back, mirroring the many times Newt had ducked close to offer him grounding and affection and a moment’s privacy rolled into one.

“All well, Newt?” he inquired softly.

“I—fine. Percival, are _you_ —? The President said you’d disappeared?”

“Oh, no, that’s far from the whole of it,” Percival chided, and blinked in startlement when Newt recoiled like Percival had hexed him, and then checked himself, looking vaguely hunted. “Newt?” He didn’t think he’d seen Newt look so ill-at-ease since the last time Newt had had to report to Seraphina Picquery directly, clutching his case like he suspected she might try to take it from him. 

“No—sorry, it’s fine,” Newt said, and wouldn’t even look at him side-ways, chin tucked down like he was avoiding a boxer’s combo in a fighting ring. “Are you alright?”

“I don’t believe you,” Percival decided, gently, and used the hand he’d flattened against the small of Newt’s long back to urge him a bit closer out of the corner. “Yes, Newt, I’m well enough. The President overstepped herself a bit, but that’s nothing I want to talk about now. How’s everyone in the case?”

That should have been all that was needed to get Newt to open up; the man could and would cheerfully report on the various minutiae of his creatures’ day-to-day lives with minimal prompting through all manner of adversity—Graves had asked the question once roughly a minute and forty seconds before the trap wards the poachers they were tracking had combusted, and Newt had spent nearly the entire fight updating him on the nundu’s shedding season, the growth and development of the occamies and his plans for releasing them, and the latest antics Niffler had gotten up to attempting to steal the ginger biscuits Newt kept stashed in the shed—he’d flushed and stammered when the fight was over, apologizing for blathering on being a distraction, and Percival had dismissed it; if every person who spoke to him at length was as knowledgeable about their topics, he should never have cause to complain again.

 

“Newt, dear, shall we go?”

 

(He wondered now if he hadn’t found a root of that internalized shame.)

 

He was afforded only a flickering look as Newt slunk over to offer an arm to his mother, to guide her to the dining room. He ended up quirking a brow at Goldstein over an offered arm—her sliding glance and a hitch of her shoulders expressed equal confusion, but a pointed head jerk towards Theseus’s back indicated there was something she’d gleaned.

 

An auror hand gesture and the gentle tap of fingertips at her wrist brought a nod—full report, later.

 

 

Dinner proved no less tortuous—Mrs. Scamander seemed quite content to ignore her son’s silence, and Newt’s eyes never rose higher than level with Percival’s collar-bones but for once. Miss Lestrange oscillated between ignoring him and peppering him with overly familiar comments that clearly left him miserable, murmured responses eventually dying to silence as he began to look more and more like he’d like to emulate a turtle, or perhaps a Fwooper would be better still, speaking only to thank the house elf as she served dinner. 

The pleading look Newt shot him when Percival started to address the woman’s blithe callousness gave him pause—the slick coppery taste of challenging words on his tongue slipped smoothly into redirecting the conversation entirely. It earned him an incredulous look from Tina, but she subsided at the subtle narrowing of his eyes. Theseus, damn him, didn’t seem to notice anything was out of the norm whatsoever—it put a sick twist of anxiety in Percival’s belly, that normally-sharp Theseus was seemingly quite happy to burble back and forth with his fiancée about wedding plans, his mother chiming in with helpful suggestions, unnoticing that the other three at the table were various shades of miffed or miserable, much less that his fiancée was the cause of it.  

In fact, no one seemed to notice at all, that Newt’s shoulders were level with his ears, that Tina’s gaze could have sparked a small fire in Lestrange’s napkin, or that Percival was about ready to sweep both of his subordinate and his consultant straight back to New York—except the house elf, who kept ringing her hands as she Vanished the main course plates and replaced it with dessert.

 

He longed to be away from the table, to be free to run his hands up Newt’s arms—to make sure he was there, and this wasn’t some bizarre nightmare he was having, in a cramped armchair in his ancestral home or his own bed, about to turn dark and painful—and to soothe the man, to ensure that whatever was putting that look in Newt’s eyes was punished to the fullest extent allowed by law, and to do whatever Percival could personally do to make the process unpleasant.

 

Newt excused himself the moment his mother’s dessert spoon settled on the plate—a half-audible rush of words and a flurry of limbs as he disappeared out the door with his mother’s pursed lips and chiding “hurry back, Newton,” chasing him out.

“That boy—so _flighty_ ,” she grumbled, and then tried to turn a smile at Percival. “I apologize, Mr. Graves, for my son’s manners.”

“I’ve never had any call to complain,” he said, a quirk to his lips and a gentle tone making the rebuke as smooth as silk. One of his aurors, on the receiving end, would have shuddered—Tina’s shoulders had gone stiff as granite beneath the straps of her modest cocktail dress, her gaze frozen somewhere behind Leta Lestrange’s shoulder, because there were only two options when the Director’s voice was that soft: the he wasn’t mad, he was _disappointed_ one, where it was so much more pleasant when he just shouted—and the other was the same sort of noise a great cat might make before it severed the spinal cord with one perfectly aimed bite. “Newt has been an enormous help to my department; we are exceptionally _grateful_ for his work.”

Mrs. Scamander knew the game as well as he did, and smiled stiffly at him. “Yes, we’re—very pleased, that our Newt’s been able to make something of his. Passion.”

 

 _Your son is a hero_ , he wanted to say. _His_ passion _, as you say it (like it's a dirty word), saves untold lives--lives no one else could give a flying tea-cosy for_ , pushed against his teeth. _He’s changing the world_ , he’d like to gloat—and discovered that he would like to have leave to gloat over Newt’s accomplishments.

 

(He’d be good at it, the irreverent side of his brain enthused. He’d practice every day, until he was the best there ever was, at gloating over the wonder of Newt Scamander. 

 

And that…wasn’t really a helpful thought.)

 

“He’s a credit to you; with Ilvermorny and the European schools all adopting his book as a text, he’s been in great demand. It’s quite generous of him, to make time for us at MACUSA,” he smiled—enough teeth to make Tina flinch properly, and even Theseus looked up, instinctively uneasy—and put his utensils down with barely a sound. The dessert cocktail in front of him was surely a masterpiece of its kind, but it tasted like ash in his mouth. 

 

The house elf, tucked into the corner, shifted from foot to foot anxiously.

 

 

  

With so small a group, missing one among their number, they decided not to split off into gendered groups, but to proceed directly to the parlour with their brandy and tea.

 

 (It was almost a shame; Percival would far from mind the opportunity to demand to know exactly what Theseus thought he was playing at, when something was so clearly wrong, Newt so uncomfortable around Theseus’s bride-to-be.)

 

The chatter remained largely inane—a few rounds of amusing anecdotes, a poor showing of charades that fizzled quite, quite quickly; but aurors didn’t get out terribly much, and Miss Lestrange had apparently run with a slightly racier crowd than was entirely comfortable for her assembled audience—Percival’s right eyebrow felt stuck in a vaguely deprecatory lift as he regarded her.

 

Newt did eventually come back—Percival had deliberately left space on the chesterfield sofa for him, Tina flanking it from an armchair on the other side, and he indicated it with a nod when Newt slipped in. Overall, he remained quite tidy—only the scent of tall grasses wafted toward Percival and a scuff of dust along the arch of one of his shoes indicated where he’d been. 

“Darling, I do hope you’ve not tracked mud on your brother’s carpets,” his mother said gently.  

 

Fortune had gifted Newt with a flush that didn’t leave him a blotchy mess, but mortification was a poor look on anyone, cheeks pretty in their color or not.

 

And it was decidedly not his place to snap at a woman about how she spoke to her grown son, but the urge flared up hard, the edge of his temper sharpening under resentment, that she should _dare_ to rebuke him thus.

 

“No, Mother. I was quite careful,” he managed after a long pause, and it sounded tight and stilted and nothing like his usual tripping way of speaking.

“Newt may look a mess, but he does—usually—take pains to keep his pets from making too much trouble,” Miss Lestrange said, eyes glittering.  

“It seems your friends might have learned something from him, then,” Percival rumbled, and smiled politely when her bright gaze bounced to him, diverted, and dragged the rest of the room’s attention away from Newt’s burning cheeks. She wasn’t a member of the Scamander clan yet, and didn’t deserve the liberties that status might have afforded her, nor the respite Newt had begged for with a glance over a sole fillet. “Perhaps they’d have saved their mothers some grief.” 

“Oh, only youthful mistakes, I think, Director,” she responded. “Just—little things. Nothing that might have gotten them expelled from school, or in trouble with the law, of course.”

Newt went rigid—the comment had fixed his color, certainly, the flush draining away with pain—and finally, so too did Theseus.

“My dear, that’s a delicate topic to be treading so hard upon,” he said, straightening from his indolent lean against the mantle.

“Oh, I’m so _sorry_ , Newt, darling, I didn’t mean to open such old wounds, please, you must forgive me for reminding you of your troubles.”

“Of—of course, Leta. No. No harm done,” Newt murmured to Percival’s elbow. She gushed her thanks, and with barely a pause for breath, turned back with a rebuttal on her lips

“But Director, surely, you don’t think my friends or I got up to any _real_ trouble—not with, say, Dark wizards. Wizard-kind is safer than we’ve been in just _eons_ , the world has gone so dreadfully _dull_. Why shouldn’t the young be allowed their youthful indiscretions? Why, Grindelwald’s the closest thing we have to a Dark Lord, isn’t he, and he’s hardly saying anything _really_ inflammatory.”

 

She might not think Grindelwald was inflammatory, but the Scamanders’ reactions certainly were inflamed, and if Tina puffed up any further, she’d probably explode.

 

“Leta,” Newt gasped.

“Leta, that’s enough,” Theseus snapped, while his mother looked quite startled, and managed a breathless “Miss Lestrange, I don’t think—”

“No, Miss Lestrange, I would imagine Gellert Grindelwald has grander plans than merely catering to the sadistic foibles of the backwater-pureblood’s younger set,” Percival replied calmly, and knew he should be ashamed of how much he enjoyed watching fury light in her eyes. “But perhaps he might apply to your…friends to learn some new tricks in how to torment creatures weaker than he is.”

“Do you include yourself in that estimation, _Director?_ Or only your poor blind subordinates, who can’t tell you apart from him? Only the papers implied that he had you for weeks, and they were none the wiser,” she snarled, and it was like the room had been caught under a blanket of Stupify, frozen in shock. Tina looked like she’d been hit with something stronger still, white-faced and pained.

 

Perhaps if he hadn’t just spent weeks in angry contemplation of MACUSA and his place in it, Miss Lestrange’s barb might have struck home.

And perhaps it might have left him bleeding and panicked, if he hadn’t just faced down the date that Newt and his aurors had captured Gellert-fucking-Grindelwald, spent it sober and alone, without the balm of securing some scrap of justice for Credence Barebone to distract him, staring down the bitterness of there being two weeks between the fourteenth and being dragged out of that dark little hole, his fear and horror at having been so easily replaced—perhaps if he hadn’t spent a week forcing himself to confront the reality that if he couldn’t overcome his own fears, his own anger, he would never walk back into his office an auror again.

But he had, and having done it and survived, he’d do it again. And MACUSA would never again suffer such a deception, because by all the gods and magic itself, he would work tirelessly to protect his country and his people—Morgana pity the fool that stood between him and his life’s work.

 

And he wasn’t in the habit of letting little fools with sadistic tendencies rattle him, neither in interrogation nor in the drawing room.

 

His mother would have had him over her knee, cowering before the English.

 

Besides, he thought, schooling the smirk from his lips. _Weeks_. Perhaps there was hope for his department’s reputation yet.

 

“Why should I hold them at fault? He’s a powerful wizard, whose tactics are as underhanded and foul as his goals. He defeated me as well, though it didn’t stick. I have Newt’s bravery, compassion, and incredible observational skills to thank for that.”

He enjoyed lingering over words of praise for Newt, particularly to these, who seemed so blind to his most laudable qualities. His enunciation as exquisite as his family’s fortune could make it on Newt's qualities, the New York rounded off by a lingering Irish lilt, as clear and ringing as his father’s grand speaking voice. It was very effective for cowing Congress, and he was pleased to learn it was equally good at leaving rude detractors and their fool fiancés slack-faced.

 

And he smiled again, thin, but made chillingly sincere by his desire to watch her eat crow for treating _his_ people so poorly. “But politics make for such poor conversation when amongst federal law enforcement officers, don’t you agree, Miss Lestrange? It practically becomes shop talk—quite dull indeed.”

 

She was saved from responding by the mantle clock—it struck the hour, and the hour was late enough to release them all from a desperately uncomfortable situation.

Mrs. Scamander stood in a flurry of dress robes, announced she was retiring, and practically fled the scene. Everyone else stood as well, the brothers scrambling up for politeness sake before the other women rose—Percival got to his feet a bit more leisurely. On her feet, Miss Lestrange tossed him another furious look, and quit the room with a huff and the loud bounce of the door off the chair rail, chipping the paint. Tina following her dramatic exit a second later with a mumbled excuse, and pulled the door closed behind her.

Theseus with shoulders by his ears, looking more like his brother than Percival had ever seen him, shuffled closer.

(Newt, by contrast, was eyeing the door, knees bent and head cranked to the side, calculating his escape.)

“Perce—I—”

“It’s rather late, I think. Theseus.”

“I. Well. You’ve, ah, you’ve your choice of bunking with me, or with Newt,” Theseus told him. “I thought it best to give the ladies their privacy.” He looked particularly hang-dog; if Theseus was permitted to detain him, it’d be ages before he escaped a maelstrom of well-meaning apologies.

 

As there was only one apology he wanted from his old friend, and it wasn’t for himself, and it didn’t seem precisely forthcoming, he was in no mood to indulge Theseus’s guilt.

 

Percival nodded. “Well, if Newt has no objections—”

“N-no, you’re, ah, quite welcome, Director,” Newt stammered. “Plenty of—space, since, I’ve got, you know.”

“The case, yes,” he agreed. “We should settle in then, yes?”

“R-right,” Newt stammered, and submitted to a guiding hand with only a startled look.

 

 

“I, ah, Director—”

“I thought we had agreed on given names, Newt?” he murmured, stepping aside to let Newt proceed through the door.

“Well, ah, yes of course, Percival, I—”

“There are—about a thousand reasons I can imagine as to why you might not want this,” Percival cut him off as the door closed with a quiet thud. He leaned into Newt’s personal space—he hadn’t stepped quite far enough away to begin with—and watched him freeze with uncertainty, something that wasn’t fear moving over his face. No ducked chin now; Newt’s head was held high, if averted at a gentle angle, watching him through coppery eyelashes--a neat trick, given that he had nearly three inches on Percival.

“And of course you must stop me if you don’t like it, but I’d be most gratified if you’d do me the enormous favor of allowing me—to just—” Pin the long, angular form of Newton Scamander against the door of his brother’s study, slide wand-callused hands into a broad-palmed cradle against his sharp jaw, and gently drag him down to have his lips properly ravished.

 

He might be too old and too damaged, and a week ago he hadn’t intended to do this at all, ever, but—but he’d _wanted_ to, for months. Was more than half in love with this irrepressible man—wanted to show him, if only ever the once. Perhaps the timing was wrong—he was sure it was, really, but damned if he was going to waste the only opportunity he’d ever give himself, born of temper and bone-deep appreciation.

 

Newt deserved to know he was loved, and wanted—even if it was only by the likes of Percival Graves. And as a distraction, sex was bar-none—if Newt wanted it, him, it wasn’t as though Percival would stand to _lose_ anything in offering such a thing.

 

Even if he didn’t, if perhaps Newt stopped him, pushed him back—that’d be fine too, so long as he’d chased the sting of Lestrange’s cruelty out of Newt’s head a little, so long as the man knew he had friends who would stand for him, Percival would be happy to follow any lead whatsoever. So long as he didn’t destroy their friendship—any outcome with Newt could only ever be good.

 

He silently told the bubbling, twisting sensation in his belly that couldn’t decide if it were fear or joy or despair to _shut up_.

 

Newt made a noise that was emphatically not a rejection; Percival hummed his thanks and grinned a wolf’s smile into his mouth—and pressed closer to make good use of the door as an object of support, lengthening his spine on a deep breath to better tilt his hips against the bladed jut of Newt’s iliac crests. Barely a hint of stubble scraped against the exploratory caress of thumbs he tested against the edge of Newt’s jaw, holding him close. 

“Thank you, Newt,” he murmured, lifting away, but not too far. “I’m—most gratified that you’ve allowed me—such trespass.” He stifled a grimace--he never did manage to sound any less stiff with this man, when it came down to it.

“I. I’ve been—rather, ah, hoping, you’d trespass,” Newt replied, ducking back down breathlessly to lick at the laugh Percival gave to that. “This evening—what you, what you said—I can’t—I can’t imagine. I didn’t—didn’t do all that,” he insisted, and used his lips very effectively to prevent Percival from disagreeing. “But I’d been hoping that you might, ah, might kiss me.”

“There is—a Congressional Shield in the works, you know,” Percival told him, and turned the same guerrilla style butterfly kiss strategy back on him, whispering kisses and words over his lips, trading the press of the line of his jaw against a wand-calloused palm for a soft handful of coppery hair. “For—acts of valor and—consistently going beyond the—bounds of duty. There wasn’t—a single—thing I said about you this evening that—wasn’t absolute truth.”

“I—” Newt stuttered and looked remarkably lost—and then remarkably dazed, when Percival kissed him again.

“I’m sorry for not realizing you might be uncomfortable here,” Percival admitted. “I wouldn’t have been late, if I had.” He drew back enough to take in the full splendor of Newton Scamander, dazed enough to let Percival look him full in the eyes; they really were remarkably pretty. “But I admit, your brother’s failures as a host are less than diverting, when I could revel in you. You are—exquisite.”

Flushed bright red, eyes darting towards him and away, Newt waved a spindly hand at the case. “Would—would you care to, ah, come down?”

“Only, Newt, if you’re offering it for a bit of privacy.”

“Well,” Newt said, and Percival barely had a moment to realized that there was far too much sly in Newt’s voice for his usual half-affected innocence before he ruffled stupidly long fingers through Percival’s hair, too quick for his reflexes to even manage a flinch—that ruffle turned into a massaging scrub that felt nearly as miraculous as kissing him. It left Percival blinking through a bolt of pleasure, stunned and weightless and dizzy in Newt’s arms, hair freed from its neat little knot and falling around his face. “You’ve switched to Sleekeazy’s. I don’t think we’ll have any trouble with—unexpected visitors.” 

“Or Sumatran tigers, I hope,” Percival managed, and enjoyed the tripping edge of nearly-disaster as they stumbled for the case far too much for a man of his years and supposed dignity—there hadn’t been anyone he wanted to kiss so badly he was willing to fall down a ladder since almost before he’d learned how.

“No, no new predators—though I did find a _beautiful_ colony of skavader being displaced by a Muggle town’s expansion.”

“And I’d love to meet them,” Percival murmured, admiring the way excitement sweetened the heat of passion in Newt’s continence. “After. Tomorrow, even. If you still have the energy to introduce me to Pliny’s rabbit-birds tonight, I’ll have done a poor job of it indeed.”

“I, uh, I get up—rather early, to feed them.”

“Then I’ll get you to myself before I have to share you with your family and Tina.”

 

 

“Morgana preserve me, you _do_ get up early,” Percival grumbled, waking as Newt tried to untangle himself subtly and ended up falling on top of him instead. But he ignored Newt’s apologies and his lingering, guilty attempts to shoo Percival back to bed in favor of shoving his feet into the slippers he’d transfigured from his socks.

 

(There was a giddy feeling, in having woken without an instinctive shield charm pushing against the walls, bubbly and effervescent as it sunk in that he hadn’t even reacted poorly to being fallen on, just a bit of a grunt as the—not insubstantial, for such a gangly fellow—weight of his lover pressed him abruptly into the mattress. He felt fabulous, like a slice of his old self had settled back into his bones—and it was stupid, and way, way too fast, to lay that at Newt’s feet, but he’d really, _really_ like to.)

 

He looked up, eyebrows raised. “I hear an orgasm is the equivalent of a cup of coffee. If you’ll get a move on and show me where you keep the mooncalves’ feed, I’ll have one and not the other for breakfast, and you’ll break the tie on that competition you’ve got going with Goldstein-the-Younger for second place. If that’s, you know, something you might want.”

“Sec- _second_ place?” Newt frowned.

 

 

(The scheme to reduce Percival Graves’ dependence on caffeine was widely regarded as a task nearly as dangerous as committing treason—Seraphina Picquery managed the tally-board and the purse, and all participants were strictly anonymous, for their own safety. The last winner, apparently, hadn’t been actually been fired, but had been demoted and transferred, possibly to Nebraska. The winner before that may or may not have survived switching out Percival’s cup; the rumors had been entirely contradictory on that account.

 

For fairness’ sake, Percival pretended at ignorance--unless there was something to be gained from an admission.) 

 

“Mrs. Colon is far scarier than either you or Queenie Goldstein. She once permanently switched every carafe in the Department to decaf, the last time she decided I drank too much coffee, and it was months before the discretionary fund loosened enough to cover replacements. I believe she was disqualified from participating, but as she wasn’t actually making a run for gold, I won’t induce her to do it again; she wins by default.”

“You couldn’t just switch them back?”

“Newton," he said, in quite his sternest voice, and glanced up from under grumpy eyebrows. "I had every curse-breaker who could tell his wand from his cock working on those carafes for a week solid. I imported two of them from Louisiana. We couldn’t even carry in proper coffee—it turned to decaf at the threshold.”

“Well. To second place, then,” Newt said.

 

 

“Just toast and tea for me, please, Chancey,” he murmured to the house-elf, and frowned gently across the breakfast table at Tina, who hunched over her plate, coughing indelicately into her napkin. “Alright, Goldstein?”

“Oh, oh, fine, sir,” she choked. “Just fine. Tea, sir?”

A single eyebrow rose. “Is that really any of your concern, Goldstein?”

“No, no, sir, it definitely is not, sir. Sorry, sir.”

He let her stew in that for a moment, thanking the house-elf and settling in to apply butter and rhubarb jam. A sweep of magic assured him that the other ladies and Theseus were still abed, Newt’s case glowing gently at the back of his awareness. “You have something to tell me, Tina?”

“Lestrange has something to do with Newt’s expulsion.”

“Goldstein,” he said mildly, and left it at that.

“Sorry, sir; it’d have had a bit more impact before last night. Apparently Lestrange hurt one of his creatures, and I think probably the creature hurt someone at Hogwarts—Queenie _hates_ her, sir, and Queenie doesn’t hate anybody.”

He frowned at his toast, and adjusted the spread of jam to an even layer. “Your sister has met her?”

“No, sir. Didn’t realize who she was until Mr. Scamander introduced her. He—Newt, sir, clammed up the second he saw her. And sir, she was _awful_ , all those little jabs—you saw.”

“I did,” he agreed, taking a bite.

“Sir—sir, what are we gonna do?”

He looked up, and swallowed deliberately. “What do you imagine we were going to do, Goldstein? You and I are guests in this house. We’re going to behave like adults and not cause an international incident.” And perhaps he’d manufacture enough of an emergency that he might cut the festivities short and whisk his people away; let Theseus contemplate why his guests had fled on his own time.

She shrugged, applying herself to her oatmeal. “You were pretty sharp on it yesterday, sir,” she mumbled.

“I said behave like adults, Goldstein, not roll over like a kicked crup. Remind me you need more high-profile security cases. Ah,” he held up a hand to stall the mutinous twist of her mouth. “Don’t argue with me. Wander around with that lot and you’ll learn how to sharpen even the kindest word to a cutting edge.”

“Thought that was just you, sir.”

“Flattery. You’re learning already, Goldstein.”

 


	3. Chapter 3

 

Christmas breakfast—proper breakfast; tea and toast was apparently not acceptable to Theseus's hosting sensibilities—was a vaguely stern affair for all 'Seus tried very hard to keep it jovial.

It was a shameful relief when Chancey hurried in to summon him to the fireplace to receive a call.

 

“Director Graves—Oh, thank Merlin, you’re there. Sorry sir, but you’re needed, sir. We can’t contain him—”

“What and where, Jeffries? Focus.”

“The—the obscurus, sir—M-maybe Barebone, maybe another one—We pushed it down into New Jersey, sir—Careful, like, sir, since, the amendment—Here’s coordinates.”

“Good. Well done—five minutes, Jeffries. Hold the scene.”

“Yes—Yes, sir.” And Jeffries’ head left the fire.

“Goldstein, with me—Oh, good. Newt, will you come?”

“I’ll just get the case,” he announced on a flurry of scrambling limbs.

“Sorry about this, Theseus,” he offered, yanking his tie off one-handed—sillk could be salvaged, unlike almost anything else. It would be such a shame to destroy one of the priceless Scamander heirlooms, even if it might be a favor to Theseus to thin the lot. “And please offer my apologies to your mother, as well.” There, evidence that he could play nicely.

“No, no—I know how it goes. And this hasn’t exactly been the cheerful Christmas hols I’d been attempting to engineer, after all.”

“Oh, I don’t know that I’d say that,” he replied, with a slightly wild grin as Theseus’s eyes sharpened. “Got your case, Newt?”

The portkey magic sank deep into the silk of his tie, and it was sweeping the three of them away two minutes later.

 

 

  

Newt bolted the moment they came off the portkey, faster than Percival could grab him—normal, if infuriating. Tina surged to follow, but subsided at a sharp gesture, falling into step beside him. He ducked, just a moment, to scoop up the case where Newt had left it beside him.

The cloud of twisting darkness was clearly visible over the heads of his aurors, seething with dynamic violence but not otherwise reacting to having been ringed by a crowd of wizards with their wands out. Newt had pushed through them—or more likely, Apparated past them, to the clear aggrievement of the senior aurors.

“Wands down,” he commanded, as he reached them, silencing furious shouts and parting them like a biblical sea, a carrying note in his voice so that he needn’t raise it too much. “Back to twenty paces, give Scamander room to maneuver. Weiss, what’s going on?”

The cloud roiled, knotting on itself, more and more animated, darting tendrils drifting out as the aurors--sans Percival and Auror Weiss, and Goldstein, who vibrated with the need to help--shuffled back.

“Credence,” Newt called, soft, not so desperate now, despite the anxious glance he darted toward Percival. He half-immersed himself in the Obscurus, hands spread and low, talking all the while. Tina jogged forward at Percival’s nod to join Newt in soothing the cloud; the rest of the aurors moved even farther back at his direction when it came clear that whatever they were saying was working.

It took twenty minutes for Newt and Tina to get through to the child enough that the Obscurus was wafting, like a balloon on the breeze; not, perhaps, quite ready to face being human, but calm. He knew the exact moment Barebone—and it had to be Barebone, for all the Obscurus was much smaller than the reports indicated, far more tightly reined; and sweet Morgana, could it possibly mean that Barebone was _alive_ —noticed him.

Percival, now fully briefed, had positioned himself well within the wide ring of the aurors, off to the side enough to allow Newt and Tina room to work safely, ready to intervene should anything go wrong. And now Credence Barebone, or whatever was left of him, had noticed the man with the face of a liar, and Percival found himself fully encircled by a drifting cloud of shadow sand.

The Shield Charm was instinctive, so fast his hands jumped out, rather than his usual contained movement—and it was enormous, wrapping safety around every wisp of shadow as a wild burst of charmwork and cold slush splattered against it. The sudden containment made the cloud jerk, and the curious sensation of not-sand-not-wind- _magic_ settled over his body, made the bare skin of his hands and cheeks tingle.

 

And then there was a trembling, too skinny boy, wearing rags and fear and hunger like a second-skin, ducking on himself and listing into Percival like he no longer had the strength to stand.

He’d deal with the issue of friendly fire later, Percival decided—and then there was Newt, with Tina only a step behind, helping him support the young man who’d collapsed, limp and long and alive—hiccuping into his lapels.

 

A patronus, his cougar, fed on the warmth of Newt’s hand against his ankle, anchoring him to himself and offering kindness a golden-warm afternoon months ago, trotted to his aurors.

“Weiss, everyone back to the Woolworth or their beat if they’re scheduled for patrol. Reports on my desk by five o’clock, and then unless you’re scheduled—go home. Smith, you’re on leave until Monday. Take the weekend to settle. Be available for review Monday morning. Everyone— _everyone_ —good job. I know this was a tough one. Enjoy the rest of your holiday. Dismissed.”

“Sir,” Smith started, and the cougar’s eyes showed him an anguished expression on the man’s face, even as the crack of Apparition reached his (human) ears—Barebone flinched at the sound, pressing against Percival’s chest like he’d like to hide inside Percival’s ribcage.

He hadn’t nearly died this time—Smith’s spell wouldn’t have hurt him, but there was no way Barebone knew that, so it was twice now, that aurors had attacked the young man, and that—that was unacceptable.

“Take ‘til Monday, Jim. We’ll discuss it, and work on what needs to be worked on. I appreciate your quick reflexes, and I’m aware of the difficulties of this particular case. Reflect--I’d like a misfire report from you, but don’t beat yourself up too badly—that’s my job.”

“Y-yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“Have a good holiday, Jim.”

 

“Newt,” he said, redirecting his attention as Smith apparated out. “Goldstein. I think—I think the case might be the best way. Would you mind?”

“Yes, I think a cup of tea is probably just the thing. Credence?”

Credence Barebone was the pliant sort, now that he wasn’t a writhing cloud of Grey magic and desperation. He shivered madly at being eased away from Percival’s chest—and wasn’t that a damning reaction?—but allowed Newt and Tina to steer him into the case to be plied with whatever calming draughts Newt has been developing in the highly illegal potions workshop Percival was steadfastly ignoring under the aegis of his retainership.

 

 

 

Two brief errands later, with the battered case dangling from his fingertips, Percival trotted up the sets to the Woolworth’s doorstep, sweeping into the building with a brisk snap of coattails. The risk clock groaned into movement, easing back to a far more acceptable designation.

 

Seraphina’s secretary hovered at the top of the stairs, looking rather like a whippet shivering in a grey-green sweater vest. Not for the first time, Percival wondered if he and Abernathy were related, and shook the thought off as unkind—to both of them.

“You’ll have to work harder to ambush me, Lakkins. Tell Madam President that I’ll be along to debrief when I’ve finished managing the most recent problem—and if she gives me any shit about being in the building, we’ll hold debrief in the sparring ring.”

Lakkins blanched, going the queer grey color of well-boiled asparagus to match his vest, and shuffled out of Percival’s way.

 

 

 

Mrs. Colon didn’t so much as blink when he blew in, but did give the case a speaking glance. “I’ll put the kettle on, then. Perhaps you’ll join Mr. Scamander in something other than _coffee_.”

“Goldstein’s with me as well, and she can’t stomach the stuff.”

“When you all have ulcers,” Mrs. Colon sniffed, “Don’t you dare cry to me about it. Hot and sweet for the Barebone boy, then? I assume you’ve got him with you as well.” There was a level of threat in her voice that Percival associated with cursed carafes and a nagging caffeine-withdrawal headache.

“I do; he’s fine—he’s mostly fine.”

“He’d _best_ remain that way, Percival Graves. The poor dear destroyed half of Lower Manhattan the last time this Department upset him.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he agreed, because Saoirse Graves, née Byrne, hadn’t raised the sort of fool that ignored a two-name edict, and retreated to the safety of his office, because she’d hold Picquery off if it came down to it, and the roast beef sandwiches in the paper bag would taste better without being subjected to a warming spell.

 

 

Newt’s calming potions must be losing their edge, he thought, as Tina ushered a gently-smoking Credence out of the case, to fold himself up small in one of the chairs.

(Percival kept them there for witnesses and weeping aurors—those who didn't know better, essentially. Everyone else rightly stood, at attention or otherwise.)

But Newt followed them up, so there must not be particularly extensive damage done to the case. Convincing the chairs and a small end table to convert themselves to a settee was not difficult, but it was something he lifted his wand for, and it earned him half a flinch and such a longing sort of look from under the fringe of a horribly over-grown bowl-cut that his own stomach clenched sympathetically.

 

Mrs. Colon bustled in at nearly the same time with the tea tray, making Credence cringe smaller still, hands curling close against his belly.

 

“The first order of business,” he said to the room at large, and let a wave of magic unpack the greasy bag to spare his desk the mess, “—is lunch.”

“An excellent suggestion,” Mrs. Colon murmured, and demurred staying. “Oh, no, Mr. Graves, I’m only on a half-day; my Fred’s got the roast on at home and I’d best be going. Don’t stay late, now, sir, and merry Christmas.”

 

 

The first order of business might have been lunch—and indeed, the others were munching away, Newt and Tina carefully keeping pace with Credence to prevent him from trying to inhale the sandwich and doing himself an injury, and maintaining a heroic effort to babble soothingly that at least kept the young man corporeal while he ate and ducked his head in nervous nods.

 

He’d fought taking the sandwich, protesting that it was too much, that he didn’t mean to impose, while his belly rumbled and his eyes reflected the same terrible hunger he’d watched Percival’s wand with--he’d given in with a grating degree of gratitude, and ate like a starving man.

 

Percival left them to it: the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh orders of business were rapidly becoming the contents of a variety of paper creatures under his pen.

Correcting the Presumed Deceased status down in records, arranging for the assignment of a caseworker as well as housing and a living stipend while they sorted Credence’s tenuous legal position, writing an emergency notice to Ilvermorny, and working up a wrongful injury claim were not things that technically fell under his job description or purview. 

But as they were also not things that could wait much beyond the end of a sandwich, and Percival’s signature would have them addressed before the end of the day on Christmas day. The arrest warrant would have to wait ‘til the end of the thirty-six hour allowance period; not even the Director of Magical Security could sign for his own arrests, and there wasn’t a chance in hell he was going to bother a Magister Judge on Christmas.

 

He paused over another piece of paper for a long moment, and finally scribbled a last little note, then put his pen aside. Professional courtesy was giving the Counsel Rep’s Office a head’s up; professional ass-covering was much the same, even if it gave Ogg and her minions more to grumble about, bothering her on Christmas day with the work of Credence’s reappearance. The boy was staring down a lifetime’s worth of trouble as it was, with at least two No-maj dead and the near-miss of exposure on a massive scale to be laid at his feet. Better to start the spin as quickly as possible.

The note folded up into a little catbird, and bounced inquisitively at him.

Percival waved his paper menagerie to the magically converted pneumatic tube system to disperse.

 

As if he’d sensed that the papers scampering off meant that the attention was back on him, Credence cringed, hung his head like he expected a beating.

 

Percival was struck again by the miracle of having the boy sitting in his office at all.

Merlin’s beard, how to begin. There were so many things beating at his attention, things he’d have liked to say when he thought Credence Barebone was dead, things he _had_ said, to the empty echoing air, enraged that their intended recipient was no longer alive ever to hear it—things he had growled at Congress, wringing concession after concession on the weight of guilt and pretty words until he had an entire law in vengeance for this unfortunate creature’s demise.

(Oh, they’d be livid that there was no earthly way that they could snatch those allowances back. He was going to enjoy that far, far too much at the next Official Function Seraphina made mandatory. Probably he’d enjoy it enough that Seraphina would excuse him early, which was more a reward for a job done well than punishment in any way.)

 

And there was the weight of knowing that, even if the courts were at their kindest, he was about to throw this boy into a nightmare, probably with only his own ragged reputation as a lifesaver.

 

“Welcome to the security offices of MACUSA, Mr. Barebone,” is what he said at last, rounding his desk. “I know that you’ve had—an experience with someone who looked like me, and went by the same name. We haven't met before, so I’d like to introduce myself properly. I am Percival Graves, the Director of Magical Security, and Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement for the Magical Congress of the United States.”

Barebone didn’t seem to dare to look up, and there were few things in life that had ever felt more wrong than looming over him from the edge of his desk—before his knee even managed to groan its discontent, Percival knelt.

Startled, Barebone lurched back in his seat, head jerking up to meet Percival’s eyes. Ah—not something Grindelwald might ever have thought to have done, if it put that level of panicked awe in the boy’s eyes. Not even the illusion of equality, not even to put the boy at ease.

 

(Tina _stared_ —he doubted she’d ever conceived that he might do such a thing either. But she hadn’t been employed (hadn’t been out of school, even) when he’d still been a Senior Auror on the streets and regularly handling victims and shell-shocked witnesses, not just the nastiest cases down in interrogation. Newt blinked, but little more—they’d both enjoyed each other in a number of positions not even eighteen hours ago, and Percival kneeling was no particular act of submission in any state.)

 

“Sir. Sir, I. C-cre-Credence. B-Bare—Barebone. Sir.”

Barebone didn’t quite manage to offer a hand for a handshake as his voice creaked and broke, but his ratty sleeves didn’t hide the scars in any case—nor the telltale gleam of year-old charmwork, hastily and sloppily done.

 

He could only hope Grindelwald hadn’t inflicted those wounds himself while wearing Percival’s face—bad enough that he’d skimped on the healing.

 

“I must be frank with you, Mr. Barebone; you’re in an—odd legal position. I’m going to do my best to ensure that justice is served.”

And he shouldn’t offer them, he really oughtn’t, but then, the boy was supposed to be dead. “There are—a number of apologies you are owed, Credence, and I’m not entirely certain that they’ll find you in any meaningful way. The first one I’d like to offer is my own: I’m sorry that my failure to repel Gellert Grindelwald gave him—the ability to harm you, with so few consequences. I’m sorry you were harmed at all,” he said.

 

And wasn’t it amazing, how much of the weight he hadn’t fully realized was clinging to his shoulders had just lifted? He’d failed many duties, many people, when Grindelwald took him, but this one—this one was one he could _fix_.

 

“I intend to see that we mitigate that harm as much as possible. I’ve contacted our No-maj Relations caseworkers and the CRUMBS office. Someone—legal representation—will be along shortly to help you through the debriefing process. If you would prefer, I will remove myself; I won’t ask you to stay in the same room as someone who has hurt you right now. I can have a senior auror who was not involved in the incident last year to lead this discussion.”

“I—I don’t. No, sir—if. If you could please stay,” Barebone requested, so tucked up he was murmuring it into his collarbones. “I know—I know you’re different.”

Percival blinked—that was two of them now, strangers from outside of MACUSA, whom he’d never met before Grindelwald had stolen his face, who knew him immediately from the man.

His face and the quality of the silence must have asked the question for him, because Credence darted another glance up, and stuttered. “It’s, it’s just. He wouldn’t have kn-kneeled. T-t-to. —And you don’t seem like—the sort to wear, to wear sc-scorpions. In you collar. Sir.” He gulped at the end of the little speech, tucking tighter on himself, and Percival had to wonder if the last year had been such a torment as to have buried righteous anger so deep that he feared it, so much that he couldn’t even bear to speak of it, or if it was just that the boy had never had an opportunity to build any self-esteem at all except when driven half-mad with lies and pain.

And then Percival had to blink again, a hand going to his collar of its own accord, the button undone and collartips drooping and his necktie still shoved in a pocket to be cleansed of the portkey magic. “Scorpions. Scorpion collar-pins?”

“Y-yes, sir.”

“With the little green gems for heads,” Newt added suddenly, remembering. “Not. Not quite your style, are they?”

“My collar pins match my cufflinks,” Percival grumbled, shaking back a cuff enough to display fine silver hands, eyes staring out from their palms. A gift from his mother, from her mother, from her mother’s mother, who had come from hotter, dryer places than Ireland, whose strength and foresight had protected her people, fleeing prejudice and torment across Europe. He’d left the collar pins home, unwilling to risk losing them to travel, taken instead a simple straight bar, just in case he was required to dress appropriately. The cuff-links had enough anti-jinx charms on them that he rarely went without them.

 

Had the entire building been struck _blind?_  It seemed like every time he turned around, there was something, some detail, that should have revealed Grindelwald within minutes of his setting foot in the Woolworth building. He blew out a breath, and resisted the urge to drag suddenly shaking fingers through his hair.

A panic attack was not something to be welcomed, much less instigated. “Merlin’s sake, scorpion collar pins. There’s not a Light wizard alive who would wear scorpions.”

 _E_ _nough_. There was nothing to be done for it now. He’d make sure everyone was well-versed on the various symbols Dark wizards draped themselves in for the New Year and refresh his Foe-finder Charms on the Department.

 

“Moving on. Hopefully not being the sort of man to wear scorpion collar pins shall be enough for now,” he decided. It was unlikely to remain that way--interrogation rarely left anyone feeling especially friendly towards their interrogators, and he certainly wasn’t going to sacrifice Credence’s good opinion of one of his other aurors when his own was so tenuous.

“My other question for you before your representation arrives, Credence, is whether there's anything you need right now? Are you hurt, or do you need more to eat? Something to drink? It may take a while, and questions are always easier to answer when you aren’t distracted."

But Credence just blinked at him, owlish, his hands tucking close against his belly again. His shoulders hunched, when he felt Newt and Tina's expectant looks, gaze falling back to the floor.

Percival nodded, and slowed himself down. "Alright. Credence, are you thirsty?"

"It. It's no trouble, Mr. Graves."

"Tea, coffee, or water, Credence?"

"If-If it isn't."

"It's no trouble at all," he assured when Credence fell silent.

"C-coffee, please."

"Sugar?" Percival asked--Newt stood to manage the pot without being asked, leaving Credence’s side with a careful pat on the shoulder--and was treated to more hunching, widened eyes darting away.

"I-I usually, just. Black."

The cup floated over, and if Credence's eyes got any larger, they'd fall out, so Percival caught it, held it out until thin scarred hands reached.

He twitched at the bitterness, a quick pull of thin lips.

"Sugar and cream it is," Percival decided, and dragged both over without looking. Hot and sweet and milky, exactly as Mrs. Colon had predicted. Credence didn’t see them fly over, not properly, but the cup wobbled when the milk slipped in, and he watched a teaspoon dump two loads into the mug of its own volition with a concussed sort of look, somewhere between horror and awe.

"Next part. Credence, are you hurt?" Thin, he was very thin—not quite so thin as Percival had been, when they had dragged him out of Grindelwald's little dungeon, but his joints showed, nobby and vulnerable, even through his clothes, and his clothes ought to be burned. Hard times had turned to worse ones, it seemed. His next note was going to be to a Healer, regardless of what Credence said next.

"Not. Not anything that—can be fixed."

"We—may be able to do something where a Muggle doctor can't," Newt offered.

"He. He already. The other--you." His fingers shook when he flicked them out, like a No-maj street magician. It was a surprisingly common gesture among no-maj-borns; Percival blamed P.T. Barnum personally--the man's manerisms had a way of lingering in the wider public consciousness for far too long--because it was also a very good way to shoot sparks unexpectedly, and he spent a long time training it out of his junior aurors.

"But it still hurts," Percival concluded. "May we see, Credence? Or would you prefer a Healer?"

"I can't—I can't pay," Credence admitted, voice cracking. But the boy offered up his hands, palms up to show a network of scarring, thick and ropey and red—and peeking a hopeful glance up at him. Percival could feel a furrow forming between his brows as he took their weight, studying the damage done. Newt had his rare fierce expression on as well, a deep pointed breath filling his narrow frame into something abruptly stolid, and poor Tina looked torn between wanting to kill someone and wanting to weep.  

"There’s a Medi-witch on retainer with MACUSA, so that isn’t a problem. Credence, this is a bit beyond espisky, and scar reduction is not a specialty of mine. Mr. Scamander here may have a bit more to offer. Do you mind if he takes a look?"

"I—he. Just. Does he need to use the. The—switch?"

"The—his _wand_?" Percival clarified, "yes, I should imagine so, though it certainly won't be to strike you. Healing charms are tricky enough to get right without showing off with wand-less spells; which is why your hands are still a mess. A, ah, a wand helps a wizard focus his magic and channel it to achieve his ends,” he added, when Credence merely looked worried.

“Percival—Credence,” Newt murmured. “These should be seen by a proper healer. I have a few things that may help, but I would need some time to calibrate them to a human dosage—a healer would be able to give me a better idea of how to alter it.”

“Alright. Goldstein, would you take them to the medical wing? I’ll join you, once the Councilor is here, alright?”

 

 

0-0-0-0-0

 

 

“Percival Graves, what fresh new hell are you playing at?”

Percival raised an eyebrow at the greeting, finishing a last sentence on yet another memo creature before looking up at the witch looming over his desk. His office door was still contemplating whether or not to bounce off the wall from the fury with which the looming woman had flung it.

Well, attempting to loom; Bella Aching, a Senior CR for the East Coast, was neither tall enough nor spindly enough to properly loom; rather she had the same threatening quality of a small handsome document case rigged with enough bombardment hexes to take out a city block. She didn’t especially appreciate being ignored—he didn’t especially appreciate being bombarded.

“And a merry Christmas to you as well, Councilor Aching. Thank you for coming so quickly—I was expecting—”

“A junior Counselor? Not a chance, Graves. Now what’s this about the Obscurial coming back to life?”

A quick gesture closed the door, and then he wordlessly offered a chair. “Well. He wasn’t actually as dead as we were led to believe, though it seems the blast likely damaged his magical core further.”

“Are you telling me that you have him in custody?”

“No, of course not, Counselor; I haven’t got a warrant for his arrest nor a list of charges. He’s in the building at the moment under auror supervision, with the Medi-witch now, fixing another one of Grindelwald’s messes, but I haven’t told him his rights, and he isn’t aware he’s being detained. I have thirty-two hours left before warrants are necessary.”

“We didn’t press charges against him because he was dead.” She narrowed her eyes. “They’re too serious to simply ignore—he was implicated in the murder of at least two no-maj, and nearly shattered the Statute of Secrecy entirely. My office can’t ignore that.”

“Counselor,” he reproved, a frown tugging at his brow. “I understand; I’m not asking you--or Councilwoman Ogg--to ignore that, and I’m not ignoring it either. We cannot afford to ignore it.”

“Good, because the District Councilwoman sent these with me,” she said, passing over a stack of papers--arrest warrants. He flicked through, noting the charges. “You’re connected to him now, politically. With the Barebone Amendment.”

Percival inclined his head, glancing up. “This is true. As you said, he was dead. Now he’s not, though, and we have an opportunity to address how we ensure a balance between safety and justice.”

She tilted her head, sharp brown eyes narrowing again. “What’s your game, Graves? Off the record?”

He couldn’t help but smirk a bit, at that--they had been asking that of each other for a decade and a half. “Same game as always, Aching. It hasn’t changed since the last time we sat down together, unless you sat down with someone else.”

“Eugh--excuse me, no, I don’t believe so. You know I try to keep my visits to this office infrequent,” she said, a sharp grin dragging out one of Percival’s own. “Fine—best case scenario, then.”

“Best case--Barebone comes through an honest trial with a sentence that we can turn into rehabilitation. Give him the time and place to learn, integrate. Leave him out of the political backlash, as much as possible. Worst case--the nastiest snarl of a case I can engineer over the business with the strike-team Picquery led."

"Don't stop now, Graves, it's just getting interesting."

He flashed her a smile. "We build off the Amendment with that precedent, figure out how to interpret justice for the ones we lose between the magic and the non-magic. Give myself a bit of wiggle room, so that I don’t have to have my aurors brute-force every situation they encounter, and so that we aren’t accidentally creating the groundwork for the next time a scourer gets a hold of a child witch or wizard.”

“Merlin’s balls,” she decided, because Bella Aching didn’t have time for gasped pronouncements and side-along staring. “That's not just the boy; you’re going after Rappaport with a criminal trial.” 

Percival smiled, slowly, and sat back a bit in his chair.

“Huh,” she said, and eyed him. “Have to hand it to you; you certainly deliver with keeping things interesting. Alright. Wanna walk me through it?” 

“Two thirds of the magic population is no-maj born,” he said, and waited to see if she’d connect the dots. She watched him, waiting for the point.

“We forcibly orphan dozens of school children every year under Rappaport.”

 _And we expect them to perform as well or better than magic-born children to prove their worth_ , he didn’t say, because that was for the papers to print, not for convincing officials that their positions were held in part out of privilege, the same way his was. But maybe he’d nudge Jefferies towards one of the Ghost’s editors, start that plate to spinning. “Angry, frightened children don’t have any control over themselves or their magic. And they sometimes grow up to be angry, dangerous adults.” 

“As Barebone proved, yes.” 

“Oh, no—Credence Barebone didn’t have even half the chance one of our children normally might. How could he have, raised by scourers? Bartholomew Barebone’s great-great granddaughter was as bad or worse than he ever was, searching out magical children to torment.”

“So there is a connection there, then,” she said, and scowled. “And I’ll bet that’s how the No-maj politician got involved too. I’ll hand it to you, your team pulled some fancy footwork to quiet that down.”

“We strive for competence in the DMLE,” he allowed, with a gracious nod; the wards in MACUSA’s holding spells targeted Imperius and a multitude of other mind-alterers, and the reports, if he’d drawn them out graphically, would have shown a sharp leap in efficiency and critical thinking immediately upon Grindelwald’s capture.

“So that’s reduced capacity, right there, maybe even an Ignorance Excuse. And Rappaport is confining you, making it harder to track cases like Barebone’s. Harder to intercept them, before they go explosive.”

There were more reasons to fight Rappaport, of course—the question of Credence’s mother, one among the dozens of young witches and wizards who were lost to the no-maj world, too scared of the penalties for interacting to come to the police. She’d been lost before his time as Director, and Records had proved themselves—glacial, in speed. To say nothing of Queenie Goldstein’s baker, and O’Sullivan’s secret squib nephew, Delgato’s helpless years’-long crush on the pretty nurse from Queens who saved his neck in France, who ended up living half a block away from the poor man and entirely oblivious—entirely Obliviated at the end of her time with the M.A.E.F, accidental though it had been.

It seemed a sensible law, on the surface; safety and deadly danger played out in stark black and white—and it blended into such a ridiculous tangle of painful grays with no effort at all. Half the heartache he delivered, after all, came under the auspices of Rappaport.

“Rappaport is leaving us vulnerable to discovery by forcing us to remain reactive, not proactive. Barebone-- _Credence_ Barebone, might have been scooped back into the magical world before he became an Obscurial if we had more leave to investigate such cases; as it was, I believe his magical core was too damaged to register by the time he came of school age. But we've had notes on Mary Lou Barebone since before I took office.”

“Alright, that’s. It’s not a terrible argument, and it may hold some weight for the Council, especially with the Barebone Amendment signed into law; if I can get you in the witness stand, it’s sure to come up in cross-examination if we build the case around the law as the bridge between magic and non-magic. But--and that’s a damn big ‘but’, Graves—how are you gonna keep Grindelwald out of this?” Because Bella Aching also had never met an even slightly comfortable moment that she didn’t use as leverage to pry at more information—Magical Law’s finest attack dog. “I can’t use you if they start muttering you’re in league with a dark wizard.”

“I’m not going to--keep him out of it, I mean. Grindelwald is in large part what led the boy to lose control of his Obscurus—he’d clearly been managing none too poorly before then despite everything, since he’s nearly twenty. Grindelwald identified Rappaport as a source of weakness, and agitated an Obscurus until he became a weapon.”

“Not going—that’s a hell of a sword to fall on, Graves.”

“We’ll see if it comes to that--it takes a solid-steel set of cauldrons, if you take my meaning, to accuse a man of colluding with a maniac that stole his face and left him to die. If we can swing it that Rappaport is why Grindelwald came here to start his war, and that he tracked down Barebone to do it with, well….Besides, pressure on me is pressure off Barebone, and Merlin knows the boy’s had enough.”

“You, uh, soft on this kid, Director?”

There was a flush of what he realized was a dark and vicious anger sitting somewhere in his belly, and it put a little note of coldness in his voice. “No, not the way you’re insinuating. Battered young men are hardly to my taste. But there’s a lot that happened here under Grindelwald’s deception that I find myself trying to correct. He’s a big part of that, since Grindelwald decided to wear my face for his dirty work. Whatever he did to that boy was filthy, even if he never touched him.”

She ducked a nod, offered a shrug. “And Grindelwald’s views on Rappaport? Someone’s going to spin it that you’re dancing to his tune.”

“Rappaport only gives Grindelwald his teeth. Without it, we could reach out to the No-maj governments the way every other civilized country has, and have our fingers on the pulse of the country. There’s a reason he chose to pull that move here. Remove Rappaport, and we can address the no-maj fears directly and effectively, instead of trying to catch the hippogriff with the barn doors open.”

“How’s that?”

“Simple. We make the Scourers look like fools, in public, and alert the No-majs to some bleached madman running around waving a stick trying to convince people that the explosions he causes are magic. We can’t engage right now—which means we can’t get close enough to Obliviate or misdirect. It would have taken two sentences to have made Mary Lou Barebone look entirely deranged, but anyone who’d done it would have faced jail time or worse. The law makes no exceptions for undercover work, and no exceptions for emergency situations--the best it allows us is to essentially kidnap no-maj witnesses off the street to Obliviate them, and hope they don’t end up in trouble from it.”

“Speaking of Mary Lou Barebone--didn’t one of your Aurors attack her?”

“I couldn’t tell you, as I was indisposed at the time.”

 

He was going to have to speak to the Goldsteins, figure out how to address that properly to be in Credence’s best interests without the Department taking the blow. That was going to be a nightmare--he’d hoped to let sleeping dogs lie, and he wasn’t going to have that option any longer.

 

“Alright, that’s--well, it’s not a terrible plan, and if it goes well, Barebone will skip away smelling like roses, so long as your word holds. Nobody can fault you for trying to shield him a little—but don’t get obvious, and don’t get in my way, Graves.”

“When do I ever, Counselor?”

“Whenever it damn well suits you, Graves; that’s what I’m worried about.”

“Well then. Shall we--" he paused, blinking, brought a hand up to catch at his side. Blinked again,  and straightened. "Shall we go?"

"Are you alright?" She asked, more skeptical than concerned.

"Just fine," he agreed, keeping a firm grip on the loose skin of the Niffler's scruff, holding her still in the odd expanded confines of his watch pocket.

 

 

"Newt," he greeted, and deposited a squirming creature into his hands. "She's managed my wards, finally."

"Oh!" He clutched the beastie, and flushed bright red. Credence, folded small in the chair beside the magizoologist, darted a glance up and got stuck, staring at the spectacle of what an odd little creature a Niffler was.

It wasn't the time to flirt, really,  but... "I'll come by later to collect my watch, if it isn't too much trouble?"

"Oh, yes--I mean, yes, please," Newt stuttered, and very clearly missed the additional question embedded in the quirk of his eyebrows-- but Queenie Goldstein giggled, so perhaps there was some hope that she'd pass on the message.

He turned his attention to Credence, who dropped his eyes under scrutiny, to peep out from under his over-long fringe. “Credence, this--Healer Donovan.”

"Director," the mediwitch greeted, and shoved an armful of glassware in his hands. "Counselor. One now, one next week for you, Mr. Graves. They'll do with one each today. You're _all_  to eat in two hours or less. And Pepper-up for the young man, until I can get some chocolate into him. Manage the distribution while I see to fetching Mr. Scamander's dosage calculations, and Mr. Barebone's salve."  
  
He nodded, because no one argued with Healer Donovan, and especially no one argued with her when she was manning a skeleton staff on Christmas, and passed over the potions vials. "Goldstein, Newt. Best to drink it quickly, I can't say the flavor improves for lingering. Credence, this is Counselor Aching; she’ll be assessing your case and assigning a representative."

“Mr. Barebone, hello,” the Counselor greeted, her tone just a bit spider-to-the-fly. Percival had to smother a smile he didn’t entire mean when the boy’s self-preservation instinct had him flinching at the greeting--not because he hoped the boy would flinch or took any joy from it, but because it was an entirely correct response to the existential threat of a lawyer smiling. “The Director misspoke; I’ll be your representation in the coming days.”

“Oh,” said Credence, clutching the cup of Pepper-up like a shield.

"What," Tina asked, staring doubtfully at the crystal vial Percival had just pressed into her hand. Its contents were murky, and writhed gently against the glass. He raised his own.

"Cheers, Goldstein. You’ll become familiar with it; it’s for the grey magic exposure.”

“Ooh, brilliant--I, um, I’ve been looking for something that might help with that, for the, ah, the unicorn. She gets dreadfully anxious. Do you imagine they might give me the recipe?” Newt asked, downing his with a terrible grimace. “Augh, that’s awful. Mint and lemongrass might help...I wonder--hmm, certainly murtlap.”

“I highly doubt it,” he informed his lover, grimacing over the petrol-and-stormwater taste. “Goldstein,” he prodded, and was gratified that she had swallowed before Newt concluded that the potion was drawing it’s main purification properties from the shed shells of a magical beetle, because then she looked far more ill over having consumed it.

“Director, has Mr. Barebone been debriefed?”

“No, Councilor Aching,” he said with great patience, because the ritual of it was necessary, but not any less tiresome for being necessary.  “When we’re done here, if he’s ready for it, we can begin.”

 

 

There was, of course, no such thing as efficiency: especially not in a situation torn between medical and legal, legal and law enforcement. It was nearly two hours later before Percival found himself sitting at one of the interrogation tables, facing Credence, Bella Aching at the boy’s side. He’d rather hoped it would take longer: there was never a good time for interrogation, not for the victim. Establishing guilt was never an especially pleasant process.

There were questions--no, it wasn’t even the questions. It was the information he hoped to glean from them, asked over and over, in new ways each time, the clues and the hope for a confession that he needed to tear from this boy that made his stomach roll. They were questions that he’d had to answer himself, still in a hospital bed--mitigated, though, by the circumstances they’d found him in; no accusations in them. The only things he’d been directly guilty of had been not being good enough, fast enough, strong enough. There wasn’t any crime in being kidnapped, and it had eventually been deemed that he’d done as good a job as anyone might, in keeping MACUSA’s secrets.

Credence had entirely the opposite problem: he had, eventually at least, been entirely able to react with deadly force to Grindelwald’s manipulations. And the questions were made all the worse by how little background Credence had in magic, in their laws. All he could do was keep this interrogation as low impact as possible, be thorough, be gentle--and hope that he pulled out enough information for Aching to use to shred any confession.

And, of course, hope that he didn’t loose an Obscurial on New York again.

 

“Record on, please,” he asked of the wards after lingering over telling Credence his rights, and explaining them well beyond anything required by law. He hoped it helped. “Let us--begin. Mr. Barebone, would you please identify yourself for the record?” 

 

“A man approached you sometime last year. Can you tell me where you were when that occurred, and the date?”

 “How did he introduce himself?”

“What did he want from you?”

“Could you describe him?”

“How did he approach you?”

“Did he touch you? Could you please describe the contact?”

“How did you respond to that?”

“Did he draw a wand? Could you describe the wand?”

“Did he tell you how to locate the child he wanted? Did you know why he wanted the child?”

“Did you speak to any No-maj about the meeting?”

“Did he give you anything? Can you describe the object?”

“Did he touch you then?”

“Did he perform any magic? What spells? Do you have any gaps in your memories of the time?”

“How did you respond? Did you react?”

“Did you speak to anyone about it?”

“Can you describe your usual routine?”

“When you last saw him, did he harm you?”

“Did you tell him about a child?"

“Did you know that you were the child he asked about?”

“Did you do any magic?”

 

It took an hour and a half for the boy to shatter under the duress, even with Aching whispering council under her breath and pressing Percival back on the harder questions, and when Credence went, on a wail of mingled hatred and despair, it was entirely up in smoke.

 

( _You’re no different than him--_ )

 

The obscurus needed no throat nor vocal cords to roar--the noise was deafening and had a blast of magic like bombardment hex that rocked even a table bolted to the floor.

“Record, _off_ ,” Percival snarled, his shield charm just as instinctive as ever, “ _Aching, get out._ ” He would take some time later, to be be vaguely embarrassed that he half-threw her, raw wild magic putting the wind to her back and speed in her heels--he’d be even more embarrassed when someone asked why it was he’d tossed out sparks the same color as Scamander-the-Younger’s coat to draw the Obscurus’s attention.

(" _Nevermind that, Delgato, what matters is that it worked.”_ )

She, fortunately, needed no second telling, and scrambled through the door with mere inches to spare before wild magic welded it shut.

Percival, on entirely the wrong side of the table even if the door had still been viable, was none so lucky, as enraged gray magic slammed itself into his shield charm twice more and then thought to squeeze, whatever sentience a magical parasite might possess now fully devoted to removing the repeated danger of the man wearing the face of a known tormentor.

His shield charm groaned audibly, which wasn’t something he’d known a shield charm could do. Apparating out from under it was a trick he’d stolen from Newt, another shield snapping out immediately upon rematerializing, as the Obscurus offered another hair-raising sound, and pounced again.

“Credence,” he said, and stalled a moment. There weren’t many promises he had any leave to offer. “Credence, it’s done now--all finished. I’m very sorry that I had to make that so difficult.”

 

The roar that met that rode the same surge of power that popped his shield like a bubble, inundated him in black sand thicker than he could see through--or breathe through, comfortably.

 

 _Expecto patronum_ was not the sort of thing that usually responded wordlessly--more to do with the effort of summoning a happy memory with something choking you than the complexity of the magic, he suspected, at least past a certain point. But the memory of cold, clear-eyed triumph was easier to drag up than proper happiness, and if he let the boy’s broken wild magic and vicious parasite kill him now, there was little hope for Credence.

 

And it would make him late, to fetch his watch from Newt, and that--that wasn’t any more acceptable than the loss of Credence Barebone.

 

(If his puma looked a bit odd, a brilliant explosion of bright silver, born of a gavel banging down on the Barebone Amendment and the scratch of a dozen quills; a fury with a silent roar and perhaps a few too many legs--well, he wasn’t looking too closely. What mattered was that the Obscurus retreated rapidly before her, and he could _breathe_ again.)

 

He coughed once, to catch his breath without the risk of grey magic curling down his throat, twice, because grey magic smoke and black magic shadow-hands felt far too similar, and spoke with as normal a voice as possible. Nevermind the shaking of his hands--they would settle. “Come back now, Credence. I’m not him, and you’re not in danger. Come back, Credence.”

The puma flung itself forward when the Obscurus rippled threateningly, driving the shadowy mass back, pushing with silent snarls and massive swipes of her front legs. When it had retreated far enough, she stopped, settled and raised one of her (definitely too many) massive paws to wash, unconcerned that the cloud that was Credence still sat pulsing in the far corner.

Rather that repeat the command, he turned his attention to putting the chamber to rights, unscrewing damaged bolts with a wave of his left hand. Wrenching the heavy table back into place produced an angry squeal of steel on steel on concrete, and then he sent the bolts back into their places. If Credence wasn’t ready to emerge, forcing him certainly wasn’t possible.

 

“Are you going to have the golden woman come and kill me again?”

“No,” Percival rasped, a calm contrast to the feral sound of Credence Barebone in liminal state, and bent to lift a chair. Newt Scamander wasn’t the only one who knew the value of carefully curated body language. “You’re well out of the way of No-maj eyes here, and the President has more important things to deal with.” He frowned at the light bulb, still flickering madly, as if it was an electrical light with a faulty wire rather than something entirely more magical. A flick of his wand and a little localized magic cleared it right up, returned it to the cold, sterile light it was accustomed to, steady and terrible. “And I don’t want my aurors getting in the habit of murdering creatures they don’t understand.”

“I nearly killed you.”

“You aren’t special, in that regard,” he replied, glancing over briefly and knelt over the sorry remains of the chair that had been slammed into the wall hard enough to shatter. “Councilor Aching may feel differently, you understand.”

“Why aren’t you furious?” Barebone demanded, unhearing, like he wasn’t tucked hard into a corner, more than half-cloud, over-large and billowing as threateningly as it could, cowering like a beaten animal.

“I don't need to be angry with you to defend myself,” Percival told him, because it was clear, abruptly, that no one had ever explained the mechanics of self-control to the young man, and that was undeniably the most dangerous thing about him. Any dog could be beaten into behaving, if you didn’t mind it savaging someone in the end--control had to be understood, had to be requested and rewarded and given, a willing endeavor.

“I don’t need to retaliate, and I’m not choosing to do so. I don't need to show you that I'm angry with myself, nor do I need to hurt you, for any reason. Just like I don't need to enjoy asking you difficult questions in order to recognize the need for it.”

Long smokey tendrils froze, then tightened in agitation. “I don't understand.”

“That's alright,” Percival decided. “You don't have to understand. Unless you'd like to.”

“Of course I want to,” Credence snarled, and jerked himself back into the corner like Percival might leap at him for the tone of voice.

“Why?” Percival asked, sitting in the chair he'd just repaired, made a show of making himself comfortable. Barebone stared, dumbfounded into solidifying. "Why should you want to?"

“I--” the way the syllable trickled down to nothing implied he might be a while, answering.

"Think about that for a moment, then," Percival invited. The boy jolted when the door was pounded on. The converted speaking tubes rattled, and spat out a tinny demand.

"Director Graves?"

“All’s well," he called back. "Scrying spells should be functional.” 

“They are, sir.”

“Then standard hand-signals apply, O’Sullivan. Is the Counselor alright?”

“Unharmed, sir, but spitting mad. She’s says you can’t interview him without representation.”

“The record is off, and staying off until she can join us again.”

“I’ll tell her, sir. The door’s welded shut, sir.”

“Good. Yes, I’m aware. Standard procedure--if you can’t get it open in half an hour, I’ll Side-along him out. Anything else, O’Sullivan?”

“No sir. We’ll monitor with scrying, and see you at quarter-past four.”

“Acknowledged, O’Sullivan, good work. Credence, have you figured out why you’d like to understand?”

“It’s. With Ma, sometimes she’d let me off with, um. Just rosaries. Like, like Catholics use. For penance.”

Percival watched him--watched him solidify from cloud to boy, from a large weightless mass to a smallish, bony bundle folded down small in the corner of his interrogation room. He wasn’t the youngest person Percival had ever sat down across from in interrogation, but he had been easily the least prepared.

 

There was a lot of guilt to be found in that. Not all of it his, but plenty to go around in any case.

 

“I. I can’t tell. With you. He--He, he was kind. Except. He didn’t want me. I. I wasn’t. Right. He wanted--Modesty? I thought. But I. He promised. He said he’d--he said he’d take me away. And he _lied_. You. I don’t know. I don’t _know_ ,” Credence entreated. 

“Credence. I want you to tell me something. It won’t leave this room. Not what happened--not why you reacted. We’ve covered that for the record, and we're finished with questioning. You had good reason, and I’m not blaming you. I want you to tell me what you felt, what you felt when you started to change. Just now. Do you recall the feeling?”

“F-fear. I was--I was afraid. Sir. And--” he gulped, convulsively, exactly the same way Percival remembered gulping, too overcome to breathe. “Angry.”

“Well done, Credence--that was a difficult thing that you just did.” The boy looked up, a quick glance, startled. “It can be difficult, to understand why we react. To understand what we’re feeling. Especially when we’re afraid, or angry, or hurt. Even more, when someone is hurting us.” Recognition was as good a first step to self-control as any. "And it can be very hard to say it outloud. Thank you for answering."

“She. To. To keep me from sinning.”

“I--I see. Did it work?” he asked, mildly, and earned a wild-eyed look. He shrugged, mimed being at ease, shoved a deep anger down. He hadn’t been referring to Mary Lou Barebone at all. “Did beating you help you to, ah, sin less?”

“I--F-folly is, is in the heart of the--the child, and the rod of-of discipline d-drives it--from him. Sir.”

 _Mercy Lewis and all the other thrice-accursed accusers._ “Ah, folly. You’ll have to forgive me, Credence, as my grasp on the scriptures of the no-maj bible are--imperfect, and I don’t mean to disparage beliefs you hold dear. But beating a child--harming a child in any way, for something entirely beyond their control seems--frankly, evil.”

He frowned, remembering--the Bible wasn’t exactly fresh to mind, given that he’d picked it up early in his auror training, to try and understand what drove the Scourers in their cruelty, and he wasn’t exactly keen on entering a theological debate with a boy who’d been brainwashed by said Scourers; there hadn’t been enough in the bible that had exactly convinced him it was a _kind_ sort of book to choose to live by, and Credence’s case certainly wasn’t helping to change his mind.

But he’d had a point for this conversation, and while he didn’t mind meandering back to it, getting too far afield wasn’t going to help.

“I seem to recall: ‘cursed be anyone who sheds innocent blood.’” 

“The--it’s. Sorcerers don’t count. Magic is--is unnatural. Sir.”

“That’s possible.” There were other children that Mary Lou Barebone had harmed, he knew. Children that were entirely outside of his power to help, who certainly didn’t fall under such an exception. But there were wizards who treated their children just as poorly--it wasn’t a No-maj failure, it was a human one. And acknowledging it made Credence stare at him in a new way, perplexed and a bit afraid, but direct.

“Tell me, do you imagine that anything might become unnatural, if someone wanted others to hate it?”

“I--” Wide dark eyes, stunned, uncertain expression. Just on the edge of too much to contemplate, for a young man raised to fear his authoritarian mother absolutely, and who had only just begun to realize what she hated weren’t things that he needed to hate.

“I don’t need an answer,” Percival told him. “That is something you have to figure out for yourself. And we’ve gotten a bit off track. Would you like to come back to the table?”

Apparently so--Credence unfolded, a jerky, graceless move. “Why didn’t--I tried to hurt you. Why aren’t you punishing me? Every--they always have, before.” He didn’t move forward yet, still huddled in the corner awaiting Percival’s answer.

“Because by law, assault charges are pressed at behest of the victim unless the state--or Congress in this case, I suppose, decides there's a case to pursue. And I’m not interested in pursuing it. I don’t feel it just, to ask a court to weigh punishing you for reacting that way, with your history, and given my actions. As I said, Counselor Aching may feel differently, and she may press charges, since your actions endangered her.”

“I don’t--I don’t think I mean the law. Sir.” Was it odd, Percival wondered, that even with a challenge in his eyes, Credence clung to civility like a lifeline? Right up to the moment when sanity escaped him. Another man might be cursing the Graves bloodline past memory, or have never have calmed from the violence of earlier. Was it a hopeful sign? Or something that might breed an altogether more dangerous mindset?

In the moment, there was little danger in allowing the boy to turn the interrogation back on him: it was hardly a cruel thing, to give Barebone the opportunity to get some context on his own terms, begin the long process of grounding him in the magical world. He’d planned to have someone explain the situation shortly in any case--he simply hadn’t anticipated being the one to do it.

“A few reasons--not all of them have much to do with you at all,” he said, and took a deep breath. “Gellert Grindelwald tried very hard to destroy the secrecy of magical society in America. He wanted to use an Obscurus to do that.”

“That’s--he’s the one who looked like you. How?”

“We have magics that allow for that sort of disguise--they’re generally considered unscrupulous, and are rarely used.”

“Why did--why?”

“Why do we have them or why did he do that?”

“Why did he--both, actually. I’d like to know both,” Credence decided, and made the trek back to the table. Sat. Peeped suspicious eyes up, through that terrible haircut. “You’re answering my questions. No one does that.”

Well, confidence might actually suit the young man--it was time to see if it could be built, in any meaningful way. Shaped into something that translated to a sense of control of self.

“I’ll do my best; your teachers will be able to tell you more, about the disguises, at least. Polyjuice and Human Transfiguration were both developed to keep wizard-kind safe. Before the settlers came to America, European no-maj felt much as your guardian did; that wizards were evil. Polyjuice is a potion that requires some skill to make, and a sample from the person you wish to disguise yourself as--hair or blood or the like; drinking it will give the drinker the form of the owner of the hair or blood. Human Transfiguration is more difficult--it requires a great deal of focus, and a lot of magical power. To do it well, you have to understand the person you hope to impersonate very well. Do you understand?”

Credence nodded. “And--the other?”

“Gellert Grindelwald is a dark wizard--he seeks power through magic that is built on harming others. He would like to end what we call the Statute of Secrecy. That’s the agreement that wizards and witches should avoid informing no-maj people of our existence. In ending it, he would ultimately prefer that wizards take a superior role to no-maj, and rule the world.”

“That’s...what’s an Obscurus?”

“The magical force that makes you turn into a dark cloud--that’s an Obscurus. We would call you an Obscurial, suffering from one,” he watched the boy carefully; his patronus had faded away, once Credence had returned to being mostly human-shaped and bringing her out again would be exhausting. “It’s not a well-understood condition, but we know it to occur when a magical child is prevented from using magic, and when they are taught to hate themselves for it.”

“I--I thought it was. Ah, wickedness.”

“Well--there are those who would call it that,” Percival said, in the interests of full disclosure, and frowned at whatever his aurors were doing to produce a terrible gong-like thumping against the door. “Wickedness, in the sense that teaching a child to so violently hate themselves is damaging not only to the child but the community as well. Obscurials tend to be tragic stories, young children dying of trauma. The trouble with an Obscurus, though, is that they’re destructive. It’s at least part of why Grindelwald wanted you, because people struggle with that, and act to isolate an Obscurial to prevent damage.”

“Yes,” Credence agreed, bowing his head.

“Obscurials have been known to start wars--a very long time ago. Most magical societies have ways of preventing Obscurus’ from developing. In America, we try very hard to find all of our magical children very soon after they’re born.” Stole them out of hospital cots, when it was possible--took them weeping and begging from their parents, when it wasn’t. Like the Fey Lords and Ladies of his mother’s stories, but so much more fallible.

“He said--she’d be young?”

“Obscurials don’t often live past eleven--their magic destabilizes and they die.” Percival confirmed. “In surviving, you’re something of a miracle.” Credence didn’t scoff at that, but it seemed a near thing--his eyebrows did something deeply sarcastic in response.

“She...the lady in gold. And the other people.”

“That was the President of the Magical United States of America, and they were aurors--magical law enforcement.”

“Like you.”

“Like me. I’m given to understand--apologies, this is second-hand information--that they didn’t entirely realize what you were or your circumstances. Mr. Scamander identified your condition only very shortly before the confrontation in the subway, and tried to prevent you from being harmed. MACUSA hasn’t seen an Obscurial in a very long time, and we reacted to the situation--poorly. If you wish, you can protest that. Counselor Aching may be able to help you in that.”

“I remember him. Mr. Scamander. From then, I mean, not. This morning. He was fighting. Grindle--the other man.”

“Grindelwald.” It was a foul taste that name left in his mouth; he’d said it too many times already today, and no-one deserved the tale of his failure, or the offer of his support, more than Credence Barebone. “That’s the main reason, behind all this. He hurt you, and he looked like me to do it. I find that unacceptable, and I’ll do what I can to correct it.”

“How. How did Grindelwald come to--look like you?”

A snarl pushed at the muscles of his cheeks, a feral inclination towards bearing his teeth. He repressed it, the same way he folded his hands in his lap to quell the urge to hit something. Anger was fine. Displays of it were selfish, and unnecessary. “He tricked me. Disguised himself as one of my aurors, and then attacked. We fought, and I lost, rather spectacularly. He imprisoned me, and using magic, changed his appearance. He ultimately took my place for several months.”

“How- you escaped.”

“No,” he said, slowly, tasting the words. “Not really.” _Not the way you did, fire and fury and more magic than you knew what to do with._ “Mr. Scamander realized something was amiss during one of his trips of New York, and revealed Grindelwald--very shortly after you were injured. I was found after Grindelwald was captured. I didn’t escape, I was rescued.”

Credence didn’t seem to know what to do with that, and Percival couldn’t blame him, exactly. Perhaps it would have made sense if their roles had been switched, the experienced wizard and auror freeing himself; the half-starved novice being pulled from the dark. And there was an ugly thought, far too akin to wishing it so, and he didn’t. Perhaps it was another thing to simply be grateful for, alongside Mrs. Colon’s transfer, and his employees’ inattention and the genius of Newton Scamander’s observant eyes--however it had happened, Credence Barebone had fought himself free and escaped the sphere of Grindelwald’s poisonous influence without assistance.

“There isn’t any shame in being rescued,” Percival decided, and found, held Credence’s gaze. “There’s a lot to be proud of, in rescuing yourself. And you’ve rescued yourself from a number of things, Credence, without any of the help you ought to have rightfully had.”

“No,” Credence replied, shaking his head, slow at first and then with vehemence. “No, I--I don’t want that. I don’t want that, that feeling to be something I’m proud of. I don’t want to be proud of--of _destroying_. She destroyed--and he--he was worse, because I thought--”

He cut himself off, shivering. “I don’t want that. I want--I want to. To have. I. I don’t like… it hurts, and it frightens me, and I hate it, Mr. Graves, it makes me something I don’t want to be, something he wanted, and that she would have killed, if she could. I don’t--can you help me? I. I want to--be better.”

 

Percival let a long pause greet that, contemplating. It wasn’t kind, exactly--the boy’s eyes were wild and dampening with the force of his emotions, his shoulders shaking under the force of his wanting, his fear. But it would be cruelty itself--worse than anything Grindelwald had ever done to him, to pick his words unwisely and promise something he’d never be able to give.

“I don’t know that I can help anyone be better, Credence,” Percival said at last. “I think that’s probably something you must do yourself. But I can help you learn to do it. I can teach you to find the things you’d like to be, and figure out how to make them yours.”

He smiled then--too fiercely, he thought, probably, something wild rising in him, free of Grindelwald, free of his own doubt and anger. Something hot, something like truth, stern and stronger than whiskey or a kick to the head. Something that would burn deep inside him even when the anger and doubt crept back in.

“You don’t need me; I couldn’t help you when you did, and you survived. But if you want my help, if you think there’s something I could do to help you grow--truly, you have it and I am glad to give it.”

Credence nodded fervently, hiccuping as he swallowed down tears and started to calm from his agitation. Percival breathed through relief. The same words he’d said to Credence, he could apply to MACUSA--it was that last piece of understanding he’d needed to find, the keystone in all the conclusions he’d come to, the sort that put his efforts in perspective and gave him back a sense of choice. They didn’t need him--they hadn’t, and they had proved that the organization would continue even if he was replaced with the most unqualified element possible. But they requested his help, and it was his choice to give it and that--that was a soothing thought.

He smiled at the feel of a small presence by his ribs, and scooped a wriggling body up.

“Those,” he said to the little creature that squirmed on his lap, grinning up innocence as well as a creature with a bill could manage, “do not belong to you.” Already denuded of his watch, he wasn’t going to sit blithely by as the Niffler made off with his cufflinks, much less allow her to run roughshod through the halls of MACUSA, leaving chaos and tears in her wake. She grasped for them anyway, when he moved a hand to offer a rub along her head, like a mischievous toddler.

“Sir, what--what is that?” A glance up hold him that Credence had leaned up to see what he was doing--he twitched a bit under observation, but seemed curious still.

“Mr. Scamander’s Niffler. A sweet little beast, if somewhat disastrously attracted to all things shiny. She’s back for my tie-pin and cufflinks, aren’t you, rascal?” A flick of his wrist brought a dragot to hand, distracted her with its yellow shine. “They’ll be finished with the door shortly if she’s managed to come through. If you have more questions, now’s the time.”

“Will. Does--will I have to answer more questions?” Credence stuttered.

“Not today, no. We’re done, and it’s Christmas, and I’ll manage anyone who asks why. The only thing you have to do today is eat supper and sleep in a proper bed. Later--yes. Yes, there will be more questions, and it probably won’t be any more pleasant. I’m sorry about that.”

“Oh. I--okay. Can I--why?”

"There’s a long answer to this, and if you like, I will explain a little later exactly what is going on, and why. But the short answer is that you broke rules last year, rules that you couldn’t have possibly known, and that Grindelwald encouraged you to break. And if Counselor Aching and I can do this properly, we’ll manage to make other people see that it isn’t right to have put you in a position to be vulnerable to that. It’s--frankly, it’s a painful process, and I won’t be able to spare you from it, entirely.”

“Oh,” he said, and looked very small, wan, and resigned to still more pain. “And if. If they don’t believe you?”

“I know that it’s a lot to ask of you, to trust me. And if it fails--there’s a gentleman with a case full of wonders eminently capable of taking you someplace safe. I imagine he will be very pleased to help you.”

 

“Sir?” O’Sullivan opened the door.

 

“Okay,” Credence allowed, and he still looked small and wan, but perhaps not so frightened.

 

 

“Oh, thank goodness, you have her,” Newt greeted when they returned with a dragot-clutching Niffler lounging happily in hand, Counselor Aching finally shed to go back to her own Christmas festivities, and Healer Donovan’s potions dutifully swallowed, her scolding about timely meals still ringing in his ears. Newt looked somewhat frazzled, with a bit of grass in his curls and a not insubstantial amount of dust on his shoulders. Percival thought he looked magnificent, entirely in his element. “Credence, are you quite alright?”

“Y-yes, sir,” the young man agreed, ducking a nod. “I’m--I’m sorry for the fuss.”

“Oh, no, no fuss at all, so long as all’s well. Percival, Queenie’s invited us all back to theirs for supper, since it’s too late to return to my brother’s. The President’s man has been by; apparently she’s had a word with the Counsel Rep’s head witch, and it’s all to be tabled until after the seventh--January seventh--barring further developments. Credence, Queenie’s asked me to inquire if you prefer kugel or sufganiyot for dessert, as the guest of honor.”

“How on earth do you convince people to tell you things that they ought to know better than to say,” Percival asked, flabbergasted, while Credence stuttered.

“Oh, well. It’s--a gift?” Newt managed.

“Best be careful, Mr. Scamander--I’ll expand the duties of your retainership,” he joked, and had to grin wider still when Newt flushed red.

 

 

Credence, it turned out, was well known to the Goldsteins--Percival had wondered at the connection, but it seemed that the Barebone woman had regularly hunted up magical children to adopt and abuse, as Tina had been in her care for three entire weeks before she’d been whisked away to Ilvermorny and bore a small scar on her cheek from the time. She’d been looked for them since graduation, hoping to rescue Credence; apparently Mary Lou had moved frequently through the boroughs, railing against witches and dodging concerned citizens. Credence, hearing of such devotion, couldn’t seem to hold back the tears any longer, and both Goldstein women were sympathetic criers.

Newt and Percival, and Queenie’s portly No-maj, (who’d frozen at the sight of Percival when he’d sidled into the small Goldstein apartment ten minutes after their arrival with a heavy plate of fruit blintzes and a guilty smile) could only look on rather helplessly, desperately uncomfortable with collective familial tears.

They cleared up quickly enough--Queenie was the practical sort, the absolute least of her remarkable abilities, and she sniffled once and then waveringly declared that there were latkes to make, before press-ganging Percival into packing little piles of potato and onion to be fried.

“Merry Yule, Mr. Graves,” she murmured, giving up on butchering his mother’s tongue. A moment with his shields down would fix her pronunciation immediately, yet he found he preferred it this way, an earnest effort to make him feel welcome in a way few bothered with any more. There weren't too many even in New York that still 

“Very close, Miss Goldstein--and, ah. Chag--? Chag Chanukah sameach, to you and yours.”

“Aw, that’s so sweet of you, Mr. Graves--thanks, honey.” By her chuckle and mirth-filled eyes, he hadn’t done any better than she had, and he enjoyed the chuckle that tickled up out of his chest all the more for it.

 

 

Some hours later, stuffed full of a remarkable amount of delicious food, Credence was left to the Goldstein’s care--(he’d been coaxed into the arm chair by Newt at the end of dinner, and slumped slowly in the lull of happy conversation until he was curled up tight like a cat; the armchair turned to a bed beneath him with a few subtle wand flicks, though it stubbornly retained its arms and an indeterminate green color)--with a thick blanket tucked ‘round his shoulders, Newt and Percival took their leave, Kowalski joining them in a Side-Along back to the street.

(“Ah, Mr. Graves, I, uh, I know you magic folk like to keep quiet. I, uh, I just wanted to say--”

"You’d have to be a stupid man, Mr. Kowalski, to break Queenie Goldstein’s heart. There isn’t anything I would do to you that she wouldn’t have already done twice-over, if you managed, and Tina wouldn’t leave enough left of you for me to get involved.” He’d shaken the man’s hand briskly. “So don’t be stupid, Jacob; I’d have to give out a lot of bereavement leave if my aurors couldn’t get their donuts and coffee from you any longer.” He’d make sure that Queenie was at the bakery when he sent the pigeon with a Squib-shop licence for Jacob’s wall--she’d thought she’d been sly, and she had been, since that was a licence that was always going to end up on his desk for an inspector to be assigned, and he’d inspected Kowalski’s display case with considerable interest.

“Thank you, Mr. Graves, I can tell you I won’t.”)

 

And then, it was just Newt and Percival, leaning close together in the inky chill of a New York Christmas night.

“Do you think he’ll be alright?”

“Jacob? Oh, absolutely, his shop’s just around the corner.” He chuckled at the press of Newt’s shoulder, moving him just a step out of path in punishment for making light, and caught the man’s arm, tucking it through his to keep him close. “I think Credence will be fine. Unless Tina’s gotten terribly lax with transfiguration, he’s going to wake up warm and safe, to be plied with bagels and leftover blintzes. They’re not going to get into anything too complicated; with a stay of execution until the seventh, we have time to ease him into it, let him get a few days of hot meals and warm beds in before he has to deal with anything.”

“That’s very kind of you.”

“Decision came from the President, I had little enough to do with it.”

“As if you haven’t been quietly arranging everything, as it comes up,” Newt murmured. “I see you, Director, you’re a worse mother hen than a Hungarian Horntail.”

“Says the man who calls himself Mummy to a suitcase full of creatures,” he teased right back. “You have no room to talk.”

“I don’t know, Mr. Graves--you get on remarkably well with my Niffler,” Newt said, turning his head to bump his lips to Percival’s temple.

“What can I say,” he sighed, “I have a great deal of affection for charming little scamps with no respect for my laws. It’s a flaw.”

“That is a matter of opinion, I suspect,” Newt said, and paused to turn him properly. “I find it rather a virtue.”

The kiss was breathlessly passionate, the sort that had Percival’s hands tangling in Newt’s curls immediately, pulling him carefully back, pulling him to press Percival against the wall of the building beside them, out of the direct light of the streetlamp. The lean weight of him was a benediction and a spur of excitement, a long-fingered hand crawling past his jacket and under his vest to stroke burningly hot caresses through his thin shirt. He lifted away, only enough time to gasp a breath, and pressed closer still, crowding Percival back into the support of brick and glass, diving down to take advantage of an open collar.

“Do you mind marks?” Newt inquired, and didn’t waste time in applying himself when Percival gasped at the punch of excitement that lit in his belly.

“I--I’m on leave. I don’t mind.”

“Then I think you’d best take me home, Mr. Graves. It wouldn’t do for the Director of Magical Security to be arrested for gross indecency by a Muggle constable.”

“I think I’d best,” he agreed, breathless. “Are you staying for breakfast? I haven’t anything in the cupboards.”

“Then we’ll go to mine for that,” Newt said, smiling. “It’s not so far.”

“Good,” Percival said, and showed off by whipping them both into an Apparition on the press of a kiss and not even running afoul of the hall table upon arrival.


	4. The Epilogue (but pronounced like "gratuitous sex")

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> \--now with more plot!

 

“Cor--correct me, Percival, if I’m wrong, but-- _oh_ , yes, that’s, um, that’s very nice,” Newt’s murmur trailed away, words sprawled out across cotton sheets the same way he was, lanky and long and warm against stark white.

“Were you trying to say something, Newt?” Percival inquired, finishing another languorous exploration of Newt’s freckle-sprinkled hips and trading lips for the slow trace of fingers, mapping constellations between cinnamon stars, silvery-pink scars and the blush of his own marks. His lips were needed elsewhere, tracing the plains of ribs and chest and belly, reveling in the opportunity.

“Keep those there,” he added, of long twitching fingers.

Newt obediently kept his hands tangled in the sheets--with all that had happened, it wasn’t an especially good day for Newt to indulge his fascination with Percival’s hair. He thought that probably the magizoologist could be induced to a second orgasm this evening, if he played his cards right, since the first had been wildly rushed. Percival rewarded such obedience with a fond kiss, carefully centered just above his navel.

“Oh, yes, I--I had wondered what, ah, hmm--you have a slightly different accent, sometimes. Is that--ah, no--that’s, um. Not there, that tickles awfully.”

“Ah, sorry. Newt, you’ve a patch of, are those scales?”

“Oh, uh, yes, those are--rather an interesting reaction, actually--”

“Do--am I hurting you? They’re so smooth.” Smooth, almost soft in their slickness, like snake’s scales. He shifted, the better to see, testing their feel with a nuzzle and then lips.  

“No-nope, doesn’t hurt. ‘s like fingernails, I checked. I--your accent? Is it a New York dialect? Sorry, I, I mean, I like it very much, but it’s very faint, and I can’t quite--it sounds, a bit--”

And then there was a more interesting element, plumping again, and that clearly required the attention of his mouth far more.

“Irish, Mr. Scamander. My mother came over in ‘72.” And there was a another flush of pink to his cheeks, a widening of already blown pupils. Something to keep in mind.

“Ah, that’s--that explains--MERlin’s-sake, man, _what_ \--”

Percival blinked up into astonished eyes, and pulled away with a slick sound that made Newt’s face flame bright red. “What’s the matter? D’you not like--?”

“Wh--that is quite irregular, and, um.”

“Oh, that’s right. I’d forgotten, you Brits are odd about fellatio, at least the first time. Shall I stop?”

“I--I can’t imagine that’s sanitary, I, just. Oh, don’t laugh at me,” he grumbled, when Percival couldn’t quite stifle a grin.

“Only it’s such a pretty cock,” he murmured, and huffed warmly over it, feeling the shivering twitch as the air hit damp flesh. “It should be treated nicely. Maybe I should just lick it, instead--is that better?” A lingering swipe from base to tip saw said pretty cock bowing over Newt’s belly, bobbing, as flushed as his face.

“I--that’s so odd. I--do, do Americans typically, ah--typically f-f-f--”

“What, fellate one another? Suck cock? Hmm, tongue-lap? Which do you prefer, Newt? Oh, perhaps _frenching_ is more to your taste?” A sloppy wet suck, imitating the famous kiss, followed on the heels of the tease, Percival holding Newt’s startled gaze through his eyelashes. Enjoying the shocked arousal there, he quirked the corners of his mouth in a distorted grin, and hummed appreciatively when it made Newt’s eyes widen further.

“Well?” he inquired, sliding away again.

“You--you’re a menace-- _Snakes_ , Percival, that’s--”

“Ah-ah; keep those hands down, Newt. I could just kiss it, if you’d prefer.” He demonstrated, a quick peck of lips, entirely chaste except for the location and the viscous seep of fluid that left his lips gleaming. “Or would you rather I stopped?”

“P-please do not. Stop, I mean. It feels--o-oh, Merlin, Perc-Percival, that’s, that’s brilliant, oh--oh--”

A thought occurred, suddenly, and he pulled up abruptly, staring at his lover without seeing him. “Newt, you _genius_ , you remember the collar-pins Grindelwald was wearing last year? Do you think you could, I don’t know--sketch them? Or describe them to be sketched?”

Newt blinked up at him with an odd expression, owlish and wounded and wondering. “Whatever for?”

“If one of the scryers can use them as a focal point, they could track them, especially if we can get a sketch to distribute. Do you think you could?” It wasn’t the most enormous of clues to go on, but given how few they had, anything could be the detail that helped the International Council’s hunt.

“I-I likely could,” Newt agreed, and blinked some more, contemplative. “Yes, that’s--goodness, I hadn’t anticipated...I thought I might have to do something rash to have this. Yes, Mr. Graves, I imagine I could probably sketch them out for you. If I weren’t, you know, as hard as an Ironbelly’s hide. Do you think--”

“Oh! Oh, sorry; didn’t mean to--Mister? Oh, I see,” he said, and settled into a smile, thin and sharp. Good to know that professional wear was appreciated--better still to see Newt’s eyes go black with want, a thin approving whine in his throat. “Mr. Scamander, I appreciate your patience, and hope you’ll forgive me for keeping you waiting. Now, there are a few matters of bureaucracy that need to be dealt with before we get down to business--”

“Ah, no, oh, Merlin, Percival,  please,” because matters of bureaucracy only ever meant hideous amounts of paperwork, and Percival had just wrapped a callused hand around Newt.

“But I think in light of the circumstances, we can probably dispense with the formalities for now. You’ll need to come in to my office, Mr. Scamander,” he bit back a smile at the throaty noise Newt made, “preferably in the next five business days, to sort that out. Do you understand, Mr. Scamander?”

“Oh--oh, yes, that’s--you know we’re going to get a Howler apiece when Theseus figures out the timing with the Taboo charm. Ah, _Merlin_ \--” he yelped, when Percival laved once and then ducked down to chuckle around his cock.

“I’ll look forward to it, _Mr. Scamander_.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So usually I do a huge references list here at the end, but there's...a lot. This fic was concieved in August, and managed to survive (thrive, even) starting a second degree in grad school. There's a bunch of easter eggs, most of them Pratchett related, because Percival reminds me of both Vimes and Vetinari.
> 
> So thanks for hanging out, I hope you enjoyed it, and feel free to come bother me on Tumblr if I'm findable. I'll be cross-posting under the same name there.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for joining me!


End file.
